It's OK to let your dreams die

Let 'em go out with the tide

I’ve had a recurring dream. I own a spare little cottage near the ocean in mid-coast Maine. It’s a dream I’ve had in some form since I was a kid, from the time I was about 9. It took root the first time I visited my grandparents at the cottage they used to rent back then, walking distance to the crashing Atlantic. I think what drew me to their cottage was its simplicity, size, and sense of order. Not many things, but all in their right places. Calm. Controlled. Contained.

That dream, like a tide, would ebb and flow over the years. For stretches it seemed like the very definition of silly and other times it felt tantalizingly within reach. That’s not to say I worked toward making it a reality like a normal person (saving money, planning) but instead I pursued it through a combination of magical thinking and enjoyable hobbies: wasting the time of real estate agents (and taking advantage of their offers to go out on a boat to look at properties), feverishly collecting nautical art (and housewares and books, textiles and clothes), but mostly by believing how much better my life would be once I secured that cottage. Calm. Controlled. Contained.

Sometimes dreams clear a true path. But sometimes they’re simply a distraction, a way of ignoring your current life in order to form a foothold in an imagined (better) future.

Anyone who has read this newsletter since last October knows that it’s been, let’s say, an interesting ten months for me. As I look back over that time there are so many lessons and insights I’m taking away from it all. But perhaps one of the more jarring realizations is how easy it is to believe in the stories we tell ourselves, even when those stories are in direct opposition, even days apart. This is the true version. No, this is the one to believe in. Wait, this is what that dream meant all along.