Dreaming new dreams

My inner-critic-turned-coach finally, thank God, got my attention. He’s been probing me about dreams. And I finally stopped to hear him out, and he asked:

Neil, why the hell did you stop dreaming? When did it happen?

A piercing question. Before I could even answer, I started by defensively - and with futility if I’m being honest - rejecting the premise of his question. Of course I haven’t stopped dreaming. “Because I’ve got goals, dude”, I told him.

I may not be proud some of them, especially the ones about career and money, sure. Some of those goals, after all, appeal to the lesser angels of my nature I admit. But if I have goals, I means I haven’t stopped dreaming.

Right?

Okay, Neil, then tell me. What is a goal? What is a dream? Are they the same, are the different?

Goals, at their best, are specific and measurable. You either did them or you didn’t. They are linear and rational. Goals aren’t loosey-goosey, or they shouldn’t be at least. Some are ambitious, others are more attainable. Goals are SMART.

Perhaps goals are boring and drab, but by design. They are targets, and targets are meant to be hit with discipline and banshee-like intensity.

Goals are nouns which makes them tangible and real, even if they are a bit of an abstraction. They are part of our meta-life - the life we live in our heads thinking about and planning our actual lives - but that doesn’t make them any less concrete. Goals are real and strong. They are not fluff.

Dreams, it seems are different. And to call them dreams is to miss the point. The concept should be thought of as a verb: to dream or be in a state of dreaming. “Dreams” is almost a colloquialism like “the feels” that just describes where the paint lands on the blank canvas when we dream. “Dreams” are the souvenirs we get from time spent dreaming.

And when we dream, we’re almost deliberately not defining a concrete output that we want to achieve. It’s like the act of dreaming is a portal to a different world, where we imagine the world as we hope it to be. We are not the agent of the dream, we are merely observers and travelers in the dream-world around us. Dreaming is the creation of hope for a state of being or a feeling.

There’s something pure about dreaming. Unlike a goal, dreaming is not something we hope we accomplish, dreaming is traveling to a moment we hope will exist, for us as part of the larger world.

There’s a certain detachment of self that comes with dreaming, assuming one is not an egomaniac, incapable of imagining a world that goes beyond themselves. Dreaming, by its nature, feels like something that yearns to be bigger than ourselves and the bounds of what’s possible now.

It bothers me that sayings like, “a goal is a dream with a deadline” are things that are, well, sayings. It sullies the idea of what it is to dream. The magic of dreaming is that it need not be bounded by the ego, time, space, rationality, or the validation of being accomplished. Dreaming, I feel, is something that exists on a deeper spiritual plane than “goal setting.” Goals and the act of dreaming are different; we need them to be.

And, my inner-critic-turned-coach was right, I could not reject the premise of his question.

At some point in my twenties or early thirties, I did stop dreaming. Everything became a goal, something I could hold. Something that helped me to maximize the return on the investment of my time and energy and money and talent. I couldn’t just waste my precious life, I have to make sure I have something to show for it at the end.

It’s like my life became infected with the similar afflictions - the dreary desert sand of dead habit, or, narrow domestic walls - that Tagore contemplates in Where The Mind Is Without Fear. And now everything has to have a purpose, and is all about bangs for bucks and juices worth the squeezes and fitting in the plan and checking off Outlook tasks to hit deliverable deadlines and whatnot.

Good God, what the hell happened to me?

Neil, why did it happen?

What’s interesting is, even though most of my dreams are achieved now - Robyn and I have each other, a home, and children which covers the big ones - not all of them are.

I have longstanding dreams of Robyn and I as an old, bespectacled couple and going for slow strolls together, hand in wrinkly hand. I have dreams of our City and neighborhood being a clean, happy, and verdant place, where youngsters can’t believe that we ever had the levels of violence and poverty we have now. I have dreamed of a future where I the government is effective, fair, and compassionate. 

I even have dreams of being an, old, dying man and spending time with my sons, while bedridden - not anything morose, just a natural consequence of a long life full of love; something I pray for because I never was able to say goodbye at my own father’s bedside.

I dreamed dreams, yes. But they are old dreams now. I haven’t dreamed new dreams. And any dreaming that I’ve done is measured and tempered - nothing I’d consider bold and daring, all the dreaming I’ve done lately is nearly within grasp. It’s about my own family, or close friends, or my street, which is great no doubt.

But some of the luster and zeal of my youth has obviously faded. I have not been dreaming of the stars or the broader world outside of my own backyard, quite literally.

There’s a certain arrogance that one must have to dream, perhaps. It takes so much time and stillness to dream. And that time could be spent working, or doing chores, or processing email. That required largesse to dream takes arrogance, or at least ignorance, to expend on something as fleeting as dreaming.

When we dream, we have implicitly acknowledge that we’re not doing something “productive” and assert that we are bold and important enough to have that time and mental energy to spend dreaming. Dreaming is not a practical act, it’s an action undertaken with audacity.

The irony here is that I’m in the most stable, comfortable, and experienced stage of my life so far. I have a steady job, a family that loves me, a roof, no want of food or health. I have made mistakes and learned from them. This is probably the best time to dream arrogantly, because I’m lucky enough to have far more - in terms of material resources and love - than my sanity requires.

Why did I trade all my dreaming and settle for goals instead?

Am I afraid because I’ve lived through some truly terrible days of grief and sadness? Am I just loss-averse and hesitant to “risk” the life I have by daring to dream of something beyond the four walls of our happy home? 

Do I just think I need to be grateful for what we have and not insult the God and the universe by dreaming for something more? Am I afraid of disappointment or of running out of time? Am I just tired after long days of work, raising children, and the daily grind of washing dishes, mowing the lawn, and taking out the trash?

In my twenties, I correctly recognized that arrogance was probably my greatest character flaw. But by trying to purge myself of arrogance, maybe I also purged some of the helpful swag that creates the permission for a man to keep dreaming.

But if we have grown out of our youthful arrogance, we can still dream. We must still be able to dream. We need dream, even if it’s with humility instead of arrogance. It’s a dangerous thing when someone stops dreaming.

Maybe just like the afflictions, the answer of how to dream humbly also rests with Tagore in Where The Mind Is Without Fear where he invokes the mind being led forward - in his case to God - into ever-widening thought and action.

Ever-widening seems to be the challenge and the key. Dreaming humbly is dreaming with an ever-widening heart. It is dreaming with ever-widening love, expanding first beyond ourselves, and then expanding beyond our own backyard. And then expanding beyond our own time and space.

That widened heart, fills with love for what’s beyond just us, leaving no room for fear. When our ever-widening hearts become occupied with love, we have no choice but to dream. Love creates an involuntary reflex to dream again. We feel we must dream for what we love, the fear we have - and that pesky need to be goal-oriented and practical - can’t overcome that yearning to dream. For this greater good that we have come to love, a goal is simply insufficient.

We can push against the pressure and practicality of goals by opening our hearts to ever-widening love: compassion, honesty, and embrace of others. Foe those of us that have lost claim to our youthful arrogance and ignorance, the grace of loving beyond ourselves and our closely-knit ties is the inspiration and invitation we need to dream from a posture of humility.

There is hope for us yet.

The One-way Door

It’s been five years since Papa went through the door.

In five years, a lot of life - our marriage, Riley, buying a home, changing jobs, a trip to India, a trip to Frankenmuth, family dinners and washed dishes, backyard barbecues and park walks, Bo’s whole life, Myles’s whole life, 5 Diwalis, 5 Thanksgivings, 5 Christmases, the Trump Presidency, a pandemic, two half marathons, knowing God again, a mostly written book, and many many moments of laughter and tears - has happened.

And for a long time, I knew he had already left. But, still, I thought he might come back through that door. Not in a real way, but in a fantasy sort of way. Like, in a waking up from a dream or being on candid camera sort of way. For a long time, a little part of me was holding onto the only-with-a-miracle possibility that he’d be back.

I don’t know exactly when, but sometime in the past five years I let go of that hope. I knew and thought he wouldn’t be coming back. Finally, I accepted that it was a one-way door.

And so what to do? It is true, the door is one way. And one day, I too, will head through it. That is certain. This is all certain.

Basically all of us have this predicament at some point in our lives. We have to accept that it’s a one way door, and choose what happens next. Do we sit and wait in a chair by the door, biding our time until our turn comes? And then, relief, because we have rejoined our loved ones who have already gone ahead?

Or, do we build a life on this side of the one-way door? Do we make memories and hang those pictures up beside it? Or cover the door in crayon drawings and finger paint? Do we build a table and cook and feast to celebrate life on this side of the door? Do we laugh and cry and yawp and run and play and blush and garden and read and mend things?

I feel guilty, often, for trying to build a life without him on this side of the door. Even though I know it’s not betrayal, I think it is. I know living life is what he would make me promise to do had he known he was going, but I still think something’s not right about it. I may never rid myself of this dissonance. I don’t know.

But the door no longer haunts me, on an hourly and daily basis like it used to. It’s pain that’s chronic and manageable, not acute and insufferable. But here I still am, five years later, torturing myself by reliving memories of his last days, while weeping tears of gratitude for the life we have now. And still, thinking of him, praying, and wondering how he is on the other side of the door.

Radical Questions, Radical Diversity

Over the holiday, my father-in-law asked me a very interesting question along these lines: after asking questions on facebook for so long, what have you learned?

Over these past five years or so of asking an almost-daily questions, I’ve tried not to ask gimmicky or empirical questions. I’ve tried to ask simple, specific questions that require reflection and emotional labor. This is not for any special reason, I just I think those sorts of questions are most interesting and yield the most wisdom on how to live a good life and be a good person.

What has been surprising is how often someone says something incredibly perceptive and relevant. Like, nearly every response I’ve ever received to any questions I’ve ever asked is something valuable. Individually, everyone has something profound to contribute.

At the same time, I’ve come to realize how deep but narrow of an understanding each of us have about the human experience. Nobody’s perspective fully explains or grasps the full truth on how to live a good life or be a good person. We all have a fragments of it. We all have a remarkably clear understanding on the little piece that’s been made clear to us by virtue of our most unique and compelling experiences.

If the truth of life were a large tree, we are not photographers standing from afar that can see the whole tree. Rather, we are each little birds that understand just the leaves and branches right around us.

Which leads me to two big takeaways - to understand the big truths of our human experience we need radical diversity and radical questions in our lives.

RADICAL DIVERSITY

The importance of diversity in teams trying to solve complex problems is not a new idea. Scott E. Page (Go Blue!) has done fascinating research in this area. I loved his book on the topic, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies.

But what I would say, is that diversity isn’t just important for team problem solving. To understand the tree of human experience we need radical diversity in our live so that we can learn about the far reaching parts of the tree we’re all in, so to speak. Like, we don’t just need to learn from people who are different from us, they need to be radically different, from branches on the tree that are far, far away from us.

For example, there’s just some things that drug addicts understand better than others. Straight up. Or people who have lost parents early in life. Or people who have been bullied. Or people who have been insanely wealthy or dirt poor. Or people who have lived abroad. Or people who’ve had to execute massive projects. Or people who’ve studied the arts. Or people who have built things with their hands. Or people who have been abused. Or people who have raised children. Or people who have lied or have been lied to. Or people who have been to space. Or people who have served the most vulnerable. Or people who grew up in most typical suburbs. Or people who have been farmers. Or people who have committed heinous crimes and returned from prison.

Or whatever radical experience it is. There are just some things that folks who have had certain kinds of radical, intense experiences just understand better than I do. To really understand the human experience, I can’t settle for knowing people who are different than me - I have to learn from people who are radically different than me.

RADICAL QUESTIONS

At the same time, I will not learn much about the human experience, even if I have radical diversity in my life, if I only talk to those people about topics like the weather, sports, politics, or celebrity gossip.

To learn about human experience we have to talk about the radical things that have happened to us, which means we have to ask radical questions.

I don’t claim to be great at this yet, but I have learned a lot on how to ask good questions. And radical doesn’t mean sensational. It means questions that are reflective and require emotional labor.

And yes, I’d suggest that those sorts of questions are indeed radical. Because honestly, the bar on asking radical questions is really low. Even though the questions I tend to ask aren’t extremely radical most of the time, it’s easy to clear a very low bar.

Most questions that we’re ever asked in our day to day lives are boring and sanitized. Think about every customer feedback survey you’ve ever taken: boring. Think about every question asked during a panel discussion you’ve attend: boring or loaded with assumptions. Think about every question you’ve ever talked about chit chatting at a bar or waiting in line somewhere: boring or safe.

There are so few forums where we ask or are asked questions that require reflection or emotional labor. And so, all we ever learn about is our little twig on the tree of human experience, even if we’re surrounded by radical diversity.

And I’d also say that it’s not that scary to ask a radical question, though it may feel that way. If you haven’t, you should try it sometime.

We are so deprived of radical questions in our lives, I’ve found that many people seem to feel liberated when asked a radical question. We’re just waiting for the opportunity to share something radical, if we believe we are listened to, safe, and respected.

Radical listening and radical love in settings of radical diversity lead to radical answers to radical questions.

I think most people, at least my age, care about this wisdom of how to live a good life and be a good life. We can help each other do this. We really can.

We get to watch things grow

How do I live?

How do I live without you?

Will I ever?

—

These are the three questions. Making sense of these is the challenge of our lives. I know you know this, but I wanted to say them anyway. Out loud, so that they’re more real. So that we can confront them. Maybe together we can figure them out, enough at least.

How do I live?

What kind of man do I want to be? Should I be? What does it mean to be a husband, father, citizen, and strategist? What is my calling? What is my purpose? Why am I here? Now that I am here, what do I do? How do I act? What is my duty, my dharma? I want to be good, but what does that mean?

How do I live without you?

There were days that I thought I would never meet you. So many nights out at the bar, wondering where you were. And then you were, and we were. I knew you were somewhere, but for those hard years - where were you? And now that you’re here, and we’re married, and have sons, and a home together…I can’t even imagine…how do I live without you? I don’t know if I ever could. If I had to, how would I even start?

Will I ever?

At some point, I will die. I don’t know when it will be. Will it be before you? After you? Before or after the boys? Will I ever have to live without you?

—

It is worth trying to make sense of these questions, even though I’m not sure that we ever will, fully. We’ll just do the best we can. We’ll be able to make peace with them, I think. And we will hopefully have many days and nights together to talk about them; think about them.

—

Scene 1, Brotherly Love

I want you boys to know what you both were like together this year. Bo, you’re about to turn three years old. Myles, you just started crawling. And it is one of the joys of my life to see you two together, in brotherly love.

Yesterday, you both were playing together on the floor in the family room. Side by side. Brother next to brother. And someone said something, and you both started hugging each other. It was just what you did, even though Myles was barely able to hold himself up, he just hugged himself into his brother’s arms.

it was not planned, or prompted, or staged. It was an involuntary response. Bo, you love to help your brother to laugh. And Myles, nobody makes you laugh like your brother does.

I think by seeing it up close, I finally understand a little bit of what it meant by the phrase brotherly love. It gives me a deep peace to know that you both have this love, as it is one I always wished for. I have it now, through you both.

It is one of the loves that is pure. It is special. I am deeply grateful to have it residing in our home, in your two boys.

—

Scene 2, Stolen Moments

These days we have to steal away moments together. We haven’t been on a date, maybe in 10 months until this week. We went to your company’s drive-in movie event. We stole away for just a few hours. And it was lovely (even though you thought Ghostbusters was weird).

One of my favorites is when we steal away a little dance in the kitchen, usually after the kids are in bed - between when I wash dishes and you fold laundry. A little song, a little dance, a little kiss, and an “I love you”…that’s what we steal away and keep safe to remind us of different times, and to make new memories with old songs.

And yesterday, we stole away a special few hours. It was a special occasion (it being Saturday night will always be enough) so we opened up that cask ale bottle we’ve been saving for a few weeks. We snuck into the loveseat on the other side of the room that doesn’t face the TV, and we just talked. We stole away a few hours. Talked about our boys, our lives, our hopes, and what we’ve been feeling lately.

And we’ll not remember exactly what we said past tomorrow, probably. But we’ll remember how it felt. Because it felt like together. We stole that feeling from just being part of our forgotten history. And it was lovely.

—

I write all these scenes from our week to make a broader point, so let me make it before I lose your attention, even though I’m lucky that you still listen to me even when you ought to be bored instead.

Those three questions, the really deep ones: how do I live, how do I live without you, and will I ever, are ones that frighten me. They make me want to stop time, so that we can just stay in these blessed moments forever, and we never have to think about them again.

But these scenes from our week also put me at peace, because they reminded me we get to watch things grow. We get to watch our boys learn, get bigger, figure out their mistakes, make jokes, fall in all different kinds of love. And we get to watch our marriage grow old, and become distinguished and deeper as the years pass.

We get to watch things grow, and I say all this to say, I think that’s a fair trade for having to struggle with the hardest questions. Because even though we can’t stop time, we will eventually die, and we don’t know when - we get to watch things grow.

Racism, Reform, and the Second Commandment

In these very dark times, I am struggling to make sense of what is happening in the aftermath of George Floyd’s unfathomably cruel murder by a Minneapolis Police Officer. For a lot of reasons.

We live in a predominately black city. I have worked as a Manger in our Police Department for the better part of the last five years, so I’ve seen law enforcement from the inside. I am, technically speaking, a person of color with mixed-race children. We live in a mixed-race neighborhood.

And of course, there’s the 400+ years of institutionalized racism in the United States that I have begun to understand (at least a little) by reading about it and hearing first-hand accounts from friends who have felt the harms of it personally.

And as I’ve stewed with this, I keep asking myself - what are we hoping happens here? What do we want our communities to be like on the other end of this?

Because something is palpably different this time. George Floyd’s murder feels like it will be the injustice that (finally) sparks a transformation.

What I keep coming back to in contemplation, reflection, and prayer is the second greatest commandment - “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy self.”

What I hope for is to live in a place where I can have good neighbors and be a good neighbor. The second greatest commandment is the most elegant representation of what I hope for in communities that I have ever found.

I interpret this commandment as a call to love. We must give others love and respect, even our adversaries. If loving our neighbor requires us to do the deep work of growing out of the fear, disrespect, and hate in our hearts then we must do it. Rather, we are commanded by God to do it.

But in the world we live in today, we can avoid the deep work of personal transformation if we choose to. If we don’t love our neighbors, we can just move somewhere with neighbors we already like. More insidiously, we can also put up barriers so that the people we fear, disrespect, or hate, can’t live in our neighborhood even if they wanted to.

This seems exactly to be what institutionalized racism was and is intended to do. I don’t have to learn to love someone if I keep them out of my neighborhood through, redlining, allowing crummy schools elsewhere, practicing hiring discrimination, racial covenants, brutal policing, and on and on.

If we choose neighbors we already love as ourselves, we’re off the hook for removing the hate from our hearts and replacing it with love for them.

In this, I am complicit. Part of why we live in a city is because I didn’t want to raise mixed-race children in a white, affluent suburb. I didn’t want to deal with it, straight up.

I say this even though I acknowledge that places like where I grew up are probably much more welcoming than they were 15 years ago. Similarly, there are times that I’ve chosen to ignore, block, and unfollow people who I fear, disrespect, or disagree with. I have been an accomplice creating my own bubble to live in.

Adhereing to the idea presented in the second greatest commandment is really quite hard.

The problem is, I and any others who want to live in a truly cohesive, peaceful community probably don’t have a choice but to do the deep work that the second greatest commandment asks of us.

My intuition is that even if we dismantled institutionalized racism completely, that wouldn’t necessarily lead to love thy neighbor communities. They’d be more fair and just, perhaps, but maybe not loving.

And, I’m not even convinced we can completely dismantle racist institutions without more and more people individually choosing to do the deep work of replacing the fear, disrespect, and hate in their hearts with love.

Which leaves me in such a quandary - I truly do believe there are pervasively racist institutions in our society, still. And those institutions need to be reformed - specifically to alleviate the particularly brutal circumstances Black Americans have to live with.

But at the same time, I know I am a hypocrite by saying all this because I too have to do the deep work of personal transformation.

I did the Hate Vaccine exercise last week and realized how fearful and disrespectful I can be toward people from rural and suburban communities because of my race, job, and where I went to college. When I really took a moment to reflect, what I saw in myself was uglier than I thought it would be.

In community policing circles a common adage is that “we can’t arrest our way out of [high crime rates].” I have been wondering if something similar could be said for where we are today - can we reform our way out of racism?

Maybe we can. I honestly don’t have the data to share any firm conclusion. But my lived experience says no: the only way out of this - if we want to live in a love thy neighbor society - is a mix of transforming institutions and transforming all our own hearts.

Thank you to my friend Nick for pointing out the difference between the second commandment and second greatest commandment. It is updated now..

The Hate Vaccine - A Reflection Exercise

I subscribe to Michael Jackson’s theory of progress: “if you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make a change.”

If I want hatred, disrespect, and fear to stop spreading, that means I must not spread it myself.

This exercise is how I am trying to vaccinate myself so I don’t continue to be a carrier of hate, disrespect, and fear. I’m presenting it mostly without comment, but I will say this. When I worked this exercise last night, I realized there’s a lot I can do to be less hateful, disrespectful, and fearful.

INSTRUCTIONS: Start by determining the people / groups that have wronged you or you are expected to exchange hate, disrespect, or fear with. Then fill in the remaining boxes.

I’m working on a project related to practicing reflection, which you can learn more about at the link.