When the past becomes useful in a completely different way

The surpise is waiting for you

Sometimes the Dream Was a Feeling

My two-foot-long platinum blond ponytail swung back and forth as I asked my mother for dance lessons.

Her immediate response was no. She was busy making chicken gumbo, and anyone from a Cajun household knows that making a roux is serious business. Apparently, this was not the moment for a lengthy discussion about her young daughter’s desire to dance.

I decided to try Dad.

His answer was also no.

I was not particularly good at accepting defeat, so later that night, when we were all sitting around the dinner table and I knew the gumbo had put everyone in a reasonably good mood, I tried again. I begged the way children do when they can already see themselves inside the thing they want. I danced around the dining room, that long ponytail adorned with a very tight plastic headband,

( I pretended it was my crown) swooshing behind me as I spun in circles and acting like I knew what I was doing.

It didn’t work.

Meanwhile my cousin, who was a couple of years younger than I was, got ballet and tap lessons. Her mother enrolled her without much fuss.Me? I got piano lessons instead, mostly because a woman in our neighborhood taught piano close enough to our house that I could ride my bicycle there by myself.

It was convenient.

At the time, I didn’t have the language to understand what I felt about that. I don’t think anyone in my family was deliberately trying to tell me that what I wanted did not matter. I think they were simply making the choice that worked most easily for them. Still, something in me registered it. Something quietly closed, and I would not understand what had closed for another twenty-five or thirty years.

My desire to dance had begun with Shirley MacLaine. I would sit on the floor with a coloring book and watch her dance across the television screen, and every time she did, something in me lit up. She seemed so expressive and excited, so completely alive in her own body. There was an exuberance about her that made me smile.

I remember thinking, “I want to do that.”

For years, I thought the dream had been dancing.

Now I understand that it wasn’t.

I didn’t necessarily want to become a dancer. I wanted to feel the way she looked when she danced. I wanted that freedom, that energy, that sense of being fully inside a moment without worrying about whether anybody approved of what I was doing.

The dancing was simply the form exuberance took when it first introduced itself to me.

That realization has changed the way I think about dreams, especially the dreams we had when we were young. We tend to imagine that a dream has to be something concrete. We think we should be able to name the occupation, the destination, the accomplishment, the life we once wanted. We search our memories for some forgotten ambition and assume that if we cannot find one, there must not be anything there worth reclaiming.

I don’t believe that anymore.

More often than not, the dream was to experience a particular feeling.

Sometimes what called to us was not the thing itself but what we imagined the thing would allow us to experience. The child who dreamed of being onstage may have been drawn to expression. The girl who wanted to travel may have been longing for freedom. The one who wanted to live in some beautiful faraway place may have been reaching toward adventure or beauty or possibility. We may have been much less interested in the actual form than we realized.

That matters enormously now, because it means we do not have to drag an old plan out of the past and try to make it fit the women we are today.

I do not need to become Shirley MacLaine. I do not need to take dance lessons to prove that little girl finally got what she wanted.

I need to give my desire to feel exuberance somewhere to live, now.

These days, I feel it when I stand in front of a four-foot canvas and move a paintbrush with my whole body. I feel it when something I am writing makes me laugh out loud. I feel it when I go live and say exactly what I think, or when I post something outrageous enough to make a few people cheer and a few others clutch their pearls.

The form changed. The feeling did not.

That is why, when I talk about reclaiming dreams, I am not asking women to remember some perfectly preserved ambition from fifty or sixty years ago.

I am asking them to remember what made them come alive.

That memory may be surprisingly ordinary. It may be sitting on the floor with a coloring book while somebody dances across a television screen. It may be an afternoon spent outside, a place you once visited, a song you played over and over, a person you admired, a room you loved being in, or something you used to do before you began deciding whether it was practical.

The important question is not necessarily, “What did I want to become?”

The better question may be, “How did I want to feel?”

When we begin remembering from that perspective, the past becomes useful in a completely different way. We are no longer mourning the life we didn’t have. We are gathering information about what still belongs to us.

That is especially valuable in retirement, when so many of the structures that defined our lives have fallen away and being bombarded with fear of loss messages in all areas of life. We can suddenly find ourselves with more freedom and fewer instructions, which sounds wonderful until we realize that nobody ever taught us what to do with a life that no longer revolves around being useful to everyone else.

This is where memory can become something more than nostalgia. It can be useful to our present day.

We can revisit the moments that still make us smile and pay attention to what was happening inside us. We can stay with those memories long enough to notice what quality of life was present there, and then ask ourselves where that same quality might live now.

Not the old activity. Not the old version of ourselves. The feeling.

For me, it was exuberance.

I wanted to feel fully alive, expressive, delighted, free enough to take up some space and enjoy myself while doing it.

Apparently, that little girl knew something important long before I did.

I don’t need to recreate her dream.

I only need to listen to what the dream was trying to tell me.

And you don’t have to remember exactly what you dreamed of doing either.

Sometimes the dream was a feeling.

That may be all you need to remember.

The best part is that I have discovered I can sit quietly with the intention of recalling moments from my childhood and begin mining those memories for the feelings they still carry. I do not have to analyze them or figure out what they mean. I can simply remember what it felt like to be there and allow myself to enjoy that feeling again for a few minutes.

And that is useful now because a feeling recalled vividly enough can become present again. My soul certainly does not seem terribly interested in calendars, and memory has a wonderful way of collapsing time. When I deliberately return to a feeling of exuberance, freedom, delight, curiosity, or whatever happens to surface, I am reminding myself, Oh yes. This. I want more of this.

Then I begin noticing possibilities I might have walked straight past before. An idea occurs to me. Something catches my attention. I suddenly want to try something, go somewhere, paint something, change something, or simply follow a curiosity that would have gone unnoticed a week earlier.

And what is the value of that?

A woman who begins deliberately choosing the feelings she wants more of becomes a woman with greater clarity about what she wants. She becomes a woman with ideas. She becomes more familiar with herself again, and from that familiarity comes the willingness to explore whatever begins percolating to the surface.

That is where discovery begins.

Not with some enormous plan for the rest of your life.

Sometimes it begins by remembering how good it once felt to be you.

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, if this stirred something in you, I’d love to invite you to come a little closer.

Breakthrough is where we gather every Tuesday night, a room full of women who are no longer willing to accept the usual script for retirement. We are questioning the assumptions, remembering what made us feel alive, and making room for lives that feel like our own again.

This is not about fixing yourself. It is about breaking through the old barriers that told us what women our age are supposed to want, how small we are supposed to become, or how quietly we are supposed to disappear.

Breakthrough is included with your paid membership. There is no extra cost, and you can come when you want, skip when you want, and return when you need it.

And right now, memberships are 20% off for as long as you remain a member. Not for twelve months. Not as a temporary teaser. Forever.

If you have been feeling that little pull toward something more, come join us. This is exactly the kind of room we are creating.

Before you go, take a minute to explore the Subscriber Perks. You’ll find to rescource guides, the first chapter of my book, and special pricing for NOT DONE YET t-shirts. I add to the perks ever so often, so be sure to check on it now then because these perks are there for you as a paid member.

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