Last night I had an unusually vivid dream. It was a cloudy, windy day, and I was walking along the FDR Drive, in NY, with the East River just to my left and cars whizzing by on my right. I was carrying a small bundle of items, including a book, a letter, an unwritten greeting card, and a lego-like toy in a box.
At a point where the road turned sharply to the left, I stopped to wait for my kids, who were walking a good stretch behind me in loose single file, and had just set my pile down on the side of the road when a strong gust of wind began to blow each of my things, one by one, into the river, until all were gone except my book, which I had somehow managed to catch. In the dream I felt frustrated and a little confused—the loss had happened so suddenly—but in the next moment my kids caught up to me and together we turned left, continuing along the road as though nothing at all had happened. And then I woke up, feeling calm and well-rested.
Because I don’t remember my dreams often, I always try to write down as much as I can recall about the ones that do stay with me upon waking. Maybe the dreams that stay have stayed for a reason—at most they hold important, secret clues that I’m meant to discover and decipher; at the least they are interesting food for thought.
I wish I could remember more detail about last night’s dream, especially about the things I was carrying then lost, but by the time I woke up and wrote the dream down—a process that feels like the mental equivalent of throwing a fistful of sand in the air and trying to cup the grains as they fall, each tiny and separate, to the ground—the details were gone.
Just minutes later, I came across a really beautiful Instagram post written by my friend Tina about the fact of impermanence. The post described the unexpected and sudden loss, thanks to a thunderstorm, of a spectacular work of chalk art into which her daughter, Izzi, had poured a great deal of thought, care, and effort. Nothing, Izzi’s experience instructed, lasts forever; if we are to live our lives well, we must not cling to anything too tightly.
I felt a sharp pang of recognition as I read--as the message tangled up in my dream came into clear focus. To varying degrees, we all find ourselves now living in a time when many of the things we thought we had pinned down have come loose, or even have disappeared altogether. It’s unsettling, and leaves us grieving. Harder still is the realization that letting go of things we’ve loved often takes more strength than holding them tightly within our grasp. But understanding all this, at the end of the day, with my kids caught up behind me and my book under my arm, I know there is a peaceful, even joyful place waiting just around the bend in the busy road.
Today, the message of Izzi’s chalk art/my FDR dream is my joy.
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