What Will it Take to Say “Yes” to a Lifelong Dream?

24 Aug What Will it Take to Say “Yes” to a Lifelong Dream?

In two prior posts, we discussed living without regret.

In the first, we considered the gift of regret to prompt us to live fully in the present. We also discussed the single most important ingredient to living a no-regret life.

Today, I share insights about the cycle of heartfelt desires and challenges I faced in meeting my own.

It was 1973, and I had just turned 15 years old.

Nothing alerted me that this was the moment a desire would spark in me to blaze for more than four decades.

At that moment, I was visiting family in a small rural town in Georgia. My Mother drove my three sisters and me from Huntsville, Alabama, where we lived, to her Georgia hometown to bury our great grandmother.

After the service, Mother and her good-looking male cousins sat around a table inside a screened porch.

To be allowed to eavesdrop on them and steal glimpses of my dashing uncles, I sat quietly in a corner pretending to read a magazine.

Mother, wearing shorts and her long slender legs propped on a nearby chair, was holding court. Chain-smoking as always.

She must have seemed hip–or perhaps slightly scandalous– to her younger cousins. Divorced for years, Mother was single-mothering at a time when that status conjured judgmental images of an uninhibited woman to the tune of the popular country song, “Harper Valley PTA.”

Truth be told, Mother sometimes toyed with people’s rigid conceptions. She was full of unusual ideas and enjoyed bantering to raise the hackles of her ‘audience.’

This was the Mother sitting on that Georgia porch that day.

What she said next, though, shocked even me.

“When I get home, I’m going to buy an old school one. One of those long yellow ones. ‘Rip out the insides and build in a kitchen and a sleeping area for the girls. Then, we’re going to take it and travel the country.”

You could have heard a pin drop.

In my corner, my eyes popped open, and my heart nearly burst out of my chest. “Wow!” I thought.

Visions of getting my “Kicks on Route 66” danced in my head.

Vagabonding in a converted school bus would fit perfectly with the feelings of adventure I had tasted in the summer just a month earlier. Memories of driving in a fast car, all the windows down, blaring Allman Brother’s “Ramblin’ Man” flashed through my head.

In those fleeting summer moments, I had felt free and entirely on my own. I relished the idea of more.

Mother’s Georgia declaration ignited those images—and made them seem real. Just beyond my fingertips.

Then, like an acorn falling from an oak tree, a strong wish for a life that attracted those feelings dropped deep into the depths of my heart.

When we returned to Alabama, I felt like a little kid waiting on the magic of Christmas.

The trouble was, Mother put on the Huntsville-responsible persona I had always known her to wear once we were back home.

She had a job to return to, a house to keep up, and four girls to raise.

Instead of buying a school bus, Mother enrolled in college—fulfilling her forever dream.

There would never come a time for that converted-school-bus-travel-the-country adventure.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What happens when a hotly desired expectation is not met?

With heavy-hearted disappointment, I recognized that Mother’s Georgia porch performance was just bluster. Mere fantasy on her part.

So my germ of desire vanished like a popped soap bubble, right?

No.

Rather than floating away, this longing remained lodged in my heart, waiting for the right conditions to sprout.

A well-nourished intention develops a life of its own.

On that Georgia porch, I witnessed Mother’s travel-bus commentary with only pure, positive emotion.

Nothing in me doubted the truth of her intention.

In other words, there was no resistance to expecting that the image she painted could and would come to life.

Immediately, I had wrapped myself in “Ramlin’ Man” music vibes and daydreamed of travel by school bus.

Then, in my imagination, I drove it down the road as if it were already in my 15-year-old life.

I innocently practiced this visualization with youthful optimism for the months I waited on Mother’s deliverance of her pronouncement.

Decades later, I would learn that spiritual teachers (like Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle) recommended that very practice to make your dreams come true:

Hold only positive beliefs and emotions around your yearnings.

Feel in the present tense the emotions you would feel if you had already achieved what you desire.

Then, do not contradict those wishes with ideas about how the hoped-for-outcome will not occur.

This advice and my inadvertent visualizations also seem consistent with Jesus’ teachings:

“Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”

—Mark 11:24

Fueled by months of my powerful visualizations, this desire, it seems, had staying power. I can see its influence throughout my young adulthood.

Does this mean that I rushed out and bought a travel bus? Or, that one fell from the sky because I wanted it so badly?

Nope.

Something very different than I expected happened.

Although I would not have said so at the time, the longing for the school bus was NOT for the end goal of possessing a cool vehicle to drive down a road.

Instead, what I wanted was to feel the happy emotions that wandering down the highways promised!

For me, that meant a feeling of freedom and sense of adventure.

Creative impulses arose in the young-adult-me that were a vehicle to my desires.

Guiding me, like from a blueprint, those impulses directed me to experiences that brought me the very emotions I had fervently wished for as a teenager.

And, those experiences had nothing to do with traveling down a highway.

“Each man’s life represents a road toward himself.”

—Herman Hesse

The impact of my adolescent yearnings shone bright as white lines on a highway as I

• Followed urges for long road trips by car and air travel to distant exotic lands;
• Felt magnetically drawn into romantic relationships with men who shared with me their enthusiasm for the great outdoors;
• Developed skills like map reading, hiking mountain trails, building campfires, and locating campsites in National Forests.

As the origination of the heartfelt wish becomes more distant from the present, hearing its call becomes more challenging .

Middle age found me divorced, parenting a young child, running a household, and managing a career. The adult in me struggling to keep all the balls in the air left little room for the dreamer of my youth.

Still, my heart throbbed in chance encounters with small camper trailers.

And, for fifteen years, I spent my free time:

• Traipsing circles on half a dozen RV dealership lots;
• Joining an online membership for women who traveled in vintage camping trailers–even though I did not own one and could not travel with them;
• Researching camper trailers for hours on end, and cramming an entire file cabinet drawer full of All-Things-RV-Related.

I even briefly partnered with a man whose teardrop camper made my heart flutter.

Nevertheless, I never committed to owning an RV.

That dusty old dream was only a worn-out idea, I told myself. I chalked it up to childish imagination.

Worse, my mind filled with reasons why a travel trailer was not in my future:

“I’m a woman on my own. I can’t operate and maintain that kind of vehicle.”

“It’s frivolous. Just a waste of time and money.”

Of course, because I had spent so many years waiting to act on my urge, I would later add this one:

“I’m too old now.”

What would it take to say ‘Yes’ to my lifelong dream?

In 2014, I used a writing prompt to get me thinking about my future.

It is one that I shared in my last post. It begins, “If you had six months to live….”

I recommended it there as a an exercise that can be used to help us avoid late-in-life regrets.

The prompt worked to clarify for me that my adolescent desire remained alive within me and was calling to me.

Despite my stated intention, though, I did not “buy the RV” in the following six months.

Or, in the next six years.

Something did shift in me, though in 2020 during the early days of the COVID pandemic. With its imposed quiet and reduced distractions, I felt that old flame burning freely again.

One thing led to another, and I discovered a special camper trailer–a Vistabule–through YouTube videos.

It was the very model that made my heart flutter ten years earlier.

It is a teardrop. It features a kitchenette galley in the pop-up rear of the camper.

It was love at first sight!
I tracked down information about the company and called with questions about how to buy one.

They are custom made, I was told, and would take seven months to build.

Oh. I said, “No. That won’t work for me.”

But after two months of watching endless YouTube videos about the Vistabule and losing sleep because of thoughts of the camper, I gave in and contacted the company again.

Only this time I was told that the wait time had increased to a year and a half.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said to myself. And, again, I declined to place an order.

This time, slamming shut the file cabinet drawer on the idea of ever owning a Vistabule.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Then an unimaginable incident happened.

A young man, loved by my family died unexpectedly.

I grieved that he was lost to his loved ones.

And, I grieved for his unlived life.

The 2014 writing prompt to imagine having only six months to live did not hold a candle to this wake-up call full of grief.

Unexpected. Unimaginable—-Because this was out of the natural order. Young people are supposed to have decades in front of them to live out dreams, loves, and mysteries of their individual lives.

This unimaginable happening, though, shouted life’s harshest truism.

Life waits for no one.

Waiting for the perfect scenario to embrace what life was clearly beckoning me towards, I could see, was frivolously wrongheaded.

Irresponsible, even—dishonoring those whose lives were cut so short.

Living that way treated urges from deep within myself as ‘mere fancy,’ a triviality.

As if my “one wild and precious life,” as Mary Oliver names it, was not worth grasping with both hands, passionately.

I was not too old, this prodded me.

Until our last breath, opportunities abound to discover and say ‘Yes’ to what life is asking us to embody for our most authentic selves.

In line with that, a Chinese proverb advises:

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

Shaken awake to life’s reality, I made a subdued call to the Vistabule company within weeks of this young man’s funeral.

I asked to place an order for a camper.

Sounding apologetic, the sales woman said, “Just so you know, it will take two years to complete.”

Without hesitation, I quietly assured her, “That’s okay. Please accept my order.” And she did.

In the Spring of 2022, the birth of the desire inseminated in me forty-nine years ago will come to fruition.

In celebration, I hold up gratitude for the switchbacks of life that become the roads to ourselves.

And, I hold up blessings and gratitude for the life of our young friend who is gone too soon.