Just Dreamin'

I read something long ago that has turned out to be very true: there comes a point in middle age when you realize that a great many things you once may have dreamed about will never, ever come to pass. No doubt this happens to all of us but the very highest achievers.

For example, once upon a time, you might have dared to hope that you would someday have a house big enough to have its own well-appointed bar, and wouldn't this look awfully nice in there, with you lounging around in a velvet jacket and slippers and pipe, saying:  Another piña colada, James.

And there may have been a time when you actually believed that you would would one day have the heart to take up piano lessons again, and if you did, wouldn't this be grand to make music on?

And again, you may have somehow longed for some lovely, solid home with an actual fireplace and then wouldn't this room be something nice to come home to and snuggle up in with a cozy book, or dog, or lover?

Although who could possibly keep those white chairs white for long?  Not you, certainly.  So perhaps it is really for the best that these things did not come to pass.  It may be that you would only have made a mess of it, after all.  Had you torn through the iron gates of life, you would perhaps have had only a broken gate to show for it.  Had you dared to eat a peach, you would have dribbled the juice down your shirt front.

And would it have been worth it, after all?

A spilled drink, a broken key, a soiled fabric, a cold draft, a spent flame - reality has that annoying way of intruding on even the cheeriest of dreams.

Well, no matter. Perhaps the kindest thing we can do for ourselves in this mortal life is to dream beautifully. Some say life itself is but a dream.

What do you say?

Today's Quote: Laura Ingalls Wilder

From the biography by Donald Zochert:

Like many people who are not pushed in among the crowds of city strangers every day, she was shy and somewhat distant. . . . These quiet times came midway between the hard years of Dakota and the happy years in which she mined her memory for the stories of the Little House books. . . . she was forty-eight years old. She had already reached middle age, that balancing point in life from which many people look backward with less than satisfaction and forward with less than hope.

But Laura was happy and she always seemed to look forward with hope. Her life was anchored in the success she and Almanzo had made of the farm at Rocky Ridge [near Mansfield, Missouri], in its quiet ways and places, in the moments she put aside from her busy chores to reach out and touch the face of nature she had always adored. The hard shadowed years at the beginning of her life with Almanzo had tutored her in the paths of simplicity . . . .

Laura looked around her and thought she saw “a madness in the cities, a frenzy in the struggling crowds” – her words. “We who live in the quiet places,” she realized, “have the opportunity to become acquainted with ourselves, to think our own thoughts and live our own lives in a way that is not possible for those who are keeping up with the crowd.”

[She wrote:]

In thine own cheerful spirit live,
Nor seek the calm that others give;
For thou, thyself, alone must stand . . . .

(Note by Russ:  I very much relate to what she's saying, but in point of fact, both she and her husband lived to be past 90, and she married at 18, so they had each other to build a life with for a long, long time.  Which is not the same thing.)