In Between Dreams: Learning to Live the Present Moment as a Dreamer
I had one dream most of my twenties: move to India.
Other plans fell under that: learn Hindi, come back to seminary after a two-year term, marry, go back. That was it. Just one foundational dream—and I was working damn hard to make sure it came true.
Spoiler alert: it didn’t come true.
At least not how I planned.
That dream shattered almost as soon as it came true, when the landing gear skidded onto the tarmac in New Delhi, India, in late October 2015.
Learning Hindi did not go well. Teammate issues arose. Questions about leaving began & then lingered. The facade of this long-held dream was fading, shattering beneath the expectations I had of what this dream-come-true should look like.
To process the emotion of this dream’s shattering around me—I started writing. I would sit on my private screened-in patio of our apartment and write for hours.
Writing was an almost-dream I had in college. I loved essays and poetry and stories, but I didn’t often let myself dream about writing for a living. I would talk myself out of those dreams—because India was on the horizon; India was the dream.
But as I sat in India on my balcony, a year after college, and wrote about losing my footing upon this old dream in my shaky heart, I slowly realized it wasn’t the only dream in me anymore. New dreams were being created as my fingers were tapping the keys of my laptop.
Almost a year after those balcony-writing days in my first apartment in India, I was stuck inside a new apartment, still waiting on the old owner’s furniture and belongings to be moved out, with a cold. In a space that wasn’t mine yet, I allowed myself to think beyond life in India. Living out this dream shattered it, making it more of a nightmare. I needed a new dream, but I was afraid it would take my focus off of the present, making me unable to live this old one out.
Resting on a borrowed bed, I researched creative writing degrees and looked into freelance writing. I made pro/con lists and wrote a whole list of graduate schools that I liked. I laughed as I lay in that bed—bigger and comfier than the one I owned—giddy with ideas and big, bold hopes. I was dreaming!
I pushed through the fears because I needed something else to hold onto other than all the unknowns of the present. I needed a new dream that would one day replace the old and make the present a pleasant place to live in again. This old dream of India wasn’t fitting anymore. It felt like it wasn’t mine.
The present tends to feel like that, too: not fully ours. It feels like a holding place, borrowed until what comes next; a place awaiting our furniture, our personal touches to make the space our own. No matter how called we may feel to the very place our feet are, it can still feel foreign and hard to find footing in. Especially if it is a dream that is facing a different reality than we expected.
I once told a friend over lunch that I didn’t fully live in India until I started dreaming past India. Once I let go of the old dream’s shattered pieces that were never going to materialize in the picture-perfect way I envisioned, I began rebuilding my life in India from the broken ground up.
I let myself believe that there could be a future for me with new dreams. I became a dreamer, instead of a person with one now-shattered dream. I moved into that apartment with my own furniture. I lived presently. I taught women. I kept writing. I kept dreaming.
I stayed for my entire two-year term, despite everything. I lived out my dream, though it was old and well past recognition and full repair. I walked out of my apartment towards new dreams, perhaps even those dreams from my sick days in that same apartment.
What met me instead of new dreams was a new present. Dreaming was paused for a new job in marketing and an unexpected move to Nashville. The demands of work and life were stressful and overwhelming, not to mention that I was still processing the fact that the dream of India was, without question, finished.
That shattered dream left scars on me, though. Scars that forever mark what is important in my present-tense days: being fully present and vulnerable, writing through emotions, letting go of to-do lists and endless “shoulds.”
It taught me that dreams don’t hold their worth in coming true, but simply in their existence.
This time in-between India, new-to-Nashville, and now has made space for me to settle down into a place of my own as a dreamer, not a chaser of what the new dreams I have should look like. A person and a heart full of dreams and of small steps towards those dreams, like moving furniture and taking pictures of old journals. Reminding myself that the present acts as a road between the old and the new. One to learn from, and the other to walk, rather slowly sometimes, toward.
I think that’s always what life and faith and dreams all come back to: it’s not so much about what you do; it’s about who you are. Be known as a dreamer, not known for the dreams you have. Dreamers aren’t disconnected from the present, because they know that there are dreams coming true right now in different ways than they once imagined, and there always will be. Dreams cannot be boxed in or picture-perfect in their coming-true, they just need to breathe and move in our lives. And we need to be dreamers who are similarly open, ready to move, and willing to adapt to whatever it looks like.
[Photo by Eva Darron on Unsplash]
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Katie Rouse is a missionary-turning-marketing manager in Nashville, an enneagram 4 with a lot of feelings, and a lover of words. She just recently got married and is about to enter the final year of her twenties. If you like what you read, check out her website at Katie Rouse Writes and follow her on Instagram @katie.rose.rouse.