I am a dreamer...

So I am a dreamer.
I have thousands of dreams... I have uncountable moments in my day when I pause to imagine a life that could be.  I throw ideas out onto the universal winds...bubbles cast out into the day, each holding a world of possibility....I make impossible plans and I wonder what it would be like to live each of them...

I create lists in my head of all the things I could do in life... I dream up new options and opportunities every day.  The happier I am, the more I dream of what could be...

I want to make a difference in the world.  I want to live an interesting life.  I want to believe that my life will be different, will mean something different, will be a road less traveled.  I want to be courageous about dreaming of the endless possibilities that life offers, and I want to live amongst those dreams each day.

I want to do aid work in Africa and Guatemala.  I think I should go and work with orphans of Sudan.  I dream of living on a small tropical island for six months immersed in my art making and creating things of beauty.  I want to visit my friends in far-flung places.  I want to go to Japan, Lesbos, Flores, Turkey, Laos (again), Bhutan, Tibet, Cambodia, South and Central America, Cuba, Canada, New Zealand.... and everywhere else.  I want to see snow.  I want to go back and live and work in Kathmandu again.  I want to run successful aid agencies.  I want to write about the world and life.  I want to photograph each beautiful fleeting moment of this incredible life.  I want to spend time living in spiritual places, go to meditation classes, read inspiring books and improve my mind.  I have thousands of books and movies and places I want to experience.  I want to take my child to dharma club and dancing and gymnastics and art and acting and everything that will make her a well rounded confident little person in the world.   I want to develop a more useful career, do a PhD, become an expert at something.  I want to really know that I am helping people.  I want to write a children's book, have an exhibition, live in a gorgeously decorated house full of tasteful things I made myself, have a thriving veggie garden, bake bread and do volunteer work.  I want a successful career. I want a simple life.  I want to be an awesome parent and a fabulous friend.  I want to be a dedicated partner and have a rich family life.  I want to exercise regularly, live organically and budget my money well.  I have so many little things that I want to do in each day that I live surrounded by little voices calling me..."hey, what about this, this, that..."

My mind is like a bubble machine and my dreams erupt in rainbow bursts and float around me.  I know that I will never do them all.  I know that in reality a lot of my life is going to be spent cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, washing school uniforms, driving to swimming lessons, driving to gymnastics and play dates, having dinner parties sometimes and going out for Sunday breakfast.  I know that my life is most likely to continue to be fairly domestic, semi-interesting, not totally boring and just a little bit special.  I know that I am not going to be the one who makes a huge difference in the world.  I know that I am not going to be the head of the UN, I am not going to be Prime Minister, I am not going to be the one who runs Save the Children in Sudan, I am not going to be the one who frees Tibet.  Mostly I am ok with that.... Mostly.  Thats why I need my dreams.

When I dream up a plan...no matter how wild and crazy the idea is...for a moment while I am dreaming it I let myself feel it as a reality.  I open my mind to the option and I dive in, just for a moment, and feel that choice envelop me.  And in that one simple moment of dreaming, I get to live that life - that fabulous interesting courageous adventurous life.  I get to be the one who climbs a mountain, faces a fear, builds a snowman, saves the children, explores new horizons, makes a difference.  I get to feel what it is like to be that person.  I get to live it, in my mind, just for a moment.

I know that all of my dreams, in reality, come with massive consequences, hard choices, costs and sacrifices.  I know that it is physically impossible for me to do all that I dream.  I know that I probably would not really choose to do many of them, if the option became real.  But that doesn't matter.  When I dream I suspend reality, cast off the consequences, experience the dream cost-free. When I dream I don't have to face the realities of child care, money, disease, distance from loved ones, logistics. When I dream I get to be the person who does those things, because somewhere in the world someone is doing those things, and no - its not me.   In my dreams I get to borrow another life for a moment.  I get to be more than I am.

I get that sometimes this way of being is stressful for people around me, the people who care about me, the people who are potentially affected by my wild planning, the people who have learned to cringe slightly each time I say "Maybe I could...."  or "Lets....".  I get that it must be hard for the people who think, even for a moment, that I may either really do each of those things; or that I may suffer for not being able to do them.   I am sorry for this...but I need my dreams.  My dreams allow me to not have to live every option, take every step, really do everything I want to do.  My dreams let me live the moment and let it go, happily, peacefully.  My dreams are what allow me to be happy in the here and now.

My life is short, who knows how short...but certainly not long enough or wide enough for most of my dreams to become reality.  So I dream, I create a bubble and for a moment I live inside its rainbow sphere.  I float, in the dream, and experience it, taste it, feel it.  I add it to the bubble cloud, the memory bank of things that may or may not ever come true.  I record it for posterity, make it known that I was at least able to dream it.  I put it out there as an option, and then I can let it go, put on the kettle, do the dishes, put on a load of washing, go to bed.  And my dream floats in the cloud of bubbles that surround me as I move through daily life, dream bubbles that add colour and possibility to my days.

I need my dreams.  They let me be so much more than I ever will be.  They let me be happy with who I am.

Well Hello!

So... this is forty something...
I'm not entirely sure how this happened but most days I pretty graciously accept it. I seem to have reached the forty something threshold of life.   I am not unhappy about my life at this point.  If I am honest my life slightly rocks.  Its not perfect.  Its not cracking the ideal scales in the popular delusion of Gen X/Y social media constructed commercial consumerist competitive "my home is oh-so-beautiful and my clothes are oh-so-fashionable and my 2.5 family is squeaky clean and oh-so-well-dressed and I drive a shiny new car and know all the hottest bands and I am really hip" kind of way.  Its not winning any "hey look at me with the wonderful life" awards...but nor does it suck.  I'm a mum, a lesbian, a buddhist, a sometimes aid worker, a friend, daughter and an ex-lover to some fairly great people.  I'm a relatively nice person, I think...or at least I try to be.  One of my ex's continues to refer to me as the nicest person she's ever known, so I guess I can't be too far off track with that one.  I have to admit that I am really still trying to work out what on earth I am doing with my life... and it's a exceedingly frustrating to have reached forty something with still no clear idea of just what it is that I "do".  This is a moan I've been carrying on with for several years now.  I'm no closer to an answer unless I accept that I'm just not one of those people who has an easy answer at parties when people ask the inevitable "and what do you do?" question... But actually I'm not so keen on parties and small talk with strangers so perhaps it is not so hard to accept.  So woe betide the person who I'm interested in actually answering, because its going to take a while to list the things that I have done, and in the end...you will be no closer to an answer to what I "do" and will probably be desperate for a glass refill.  I live in hope that someday this will change.
There are a lot of things in my life that I love....my awesome kid, my family, my home, my veggie patch, art, bocconcini, gluten free cakes that are not orange flavour and fairy lights are just a taste of the juices that fill my life with joyful eruptions of smiles.  
There are not many things in my life, beyond the general state of the world and the evil perpetuated by humanity, that make me unhappy.... Big picture, yeah, there is a lot of really crappy stuff in the world and I'm not always able to be comfortably numb. Buuuut on a day to day basis there is not so much that makes me sigh too deeply. 
There are however, a lot of things that, if I am honest, I could stand to do a whole lot better at in life. Recently a friend asked me "what is the one thing you really want to do before you die?"  It's a really awesome question, and one that I think would be fabulous to ask ourselves on an annual basis...or at least each time you tick off the one thing that you answered last time the question was asked.  When I was asked I had to think for a while.  Not because there isn't enough I want to do...oh no. My To Do list thrives in my head but must never ever be written down. It cannot be. It's too big.  It would suffocate me with its enormity. I would have to have a jolly big sit down to recover from the overdose of reality.  But what struck me is that out of alllll those things in my internal iCloud there was no particular thing that absolutely had to be done before I die.  Except one, which was not so much a thing but was more the fabric of the list itself.  
My answer was that one day, before I die, I want to be able to say that right now, right here, I am living the best life I can.   My life is full of compromises, of almosts and intentions. It's full of the shadows of the things that I know I probably should be doing but don't, not really, not properly.  Like a trail of crumbs that hint at the cake but never quite fill your mouth with sticky chocolate goodness, my path is strewn with the bits and bobs of partly fulfilled principles and pieces of passions.
So my bucket wish is to be able to stand in the scene of my life, even if only for a day, and consider it a well written play executed with aplomb.  I want to tick the boxes and, fully present in the moment, be able to be damn proud of what I "do" in my daily living.  I want to walk the walk, live the dream and be the change I want to see in the world.
Which of course is totally unacheivable with my current cacophonous racket of intentionality. 
So.... I need to first live up to the life theme I have been bantering about for the last few years... I need to simplify. 
And focus.
So thus this blog is born. This blog is my humble attempt to cultivate the art of living life as a forty something.  It's about living real, living simple, living according to the basic truths of how I think I should be living. It's about letting go of laziness, compromise and fear. It's about not being comfortably numb. It's about seizing the best me I can be, gripping on for dear life and sinking the boot into each day. 
So come along for the ride. I make no promises about where it will take us... But at the very least you may walk away with greater clarity about what not to do.  And at best...well, maybe with a seed of inspiration to add to the process of creating the picture of your own way of living.