dreaming

Living the Dream

Samantha Gratton
So now what? It’s been weeks since I’ve posted my Thursday Three and blogs are few and far between this month. Yet I have so many thoughts festering inside. Ideas and inspirations, pains and longings, goals and insights. But where to start?

I’m a fierce dreamer.

I mean this both in the literal and metaphorical sense. By night, I am running from science, secrets and gun shots but by day I am thinking of all I want to do and accomplish. The past week I’ve had so many harsh dreams (or nightmares) that it makes me wonder why. Why do I have such vivid and crazy dreams, so much so that they alter my days and throw me in such a deep daytime trance? What adult has nightmares several nights in a row or dreams that stick for years and still ache to remember? Does anyone else have dreams this intense and frequent? Is this just the way it is and something that will always happen? Or does it indicate something else?

During the day, I am constantly looking for what’s next. What great feat can we accomplish? If we plan to do XYZ by X date, then that will still leave time and money for something more. I daydream about what life will look like if I pursue certain passions. What it would be like to say that I’m published or what kind of mom I might one day make. Where I want to go and who I can help. I’m constantly pushing myself and even some around me to do things, maybe to a fault. While my intentions may be good (growth, experience, interest, knowledge, accomplishment) it can be a dangerous trait. It can mean I never follow through or rather, that I am so focused on achieving said dream that I overlook the costs and sacrifices required by myself or others. As we near the end of the year and I consider some of the resolutions/goals I set for 2013, I’m reminded of this. Some of these happened and in the right way, some became less important and still some frustrate me so since they are nowhere near what I had hoped.

You know what? I’d rather be a dreamer than live a stagnant life. At night my dreams are interesting, exhilarating and exhausting. By day, I’ve learned and experienced things I might never have otherwise, and it gives me a purpose and a goal to work towards. But some dreams are easier to give up than others and in the end, you can’t keep them all. So while I’m a dreamer and will inevitably continue to be, I’m going to try and focus more on what those dreams mean. What they require, why they seem important, and what they say both about me and to me.

Finally

Samantha Gratton
After weeks (which seemed like months) my blog is back in action. Why the hold-up? Well the theme (read: layout and design) was apparently glitching out and causing the whole thing to freeze up. It drove me a little crazy, so I was emailing help support almost daily and got all of the standard, “try refreshing your browser” tips before they finally got to the bottom of it. So a new theme is here for now, but maybe I’ll play around with it some more and get it looking a bit more like me. I’d been wanting to do that for some time, and now I have an excuse. 
Okay, housekeeping details aside, I’m so glad to be writing again and not fighting with formatting issues and unresponsive scripts. Oh wait, that’s what I do in my day job. Well kinda, not really. I do test a lot of websites out to find such errors but then hand a long list of problems back to the developers. What do I do now, you ask? I’m still figuring that out and so are they. But it’s a mix of looking through schedules, talking to clients and trying to improve processes. It’s a good fit for me. It’s still a pretty slow start as you can hardly manage projects if you don’t know anything about them. I’m also slowly uncovering all my ping pong skills as that is a game of choice at work. It’s nice to peel your eyes away from a screen and move around a bit. 
I’m trying to do a few other things that are a change of pace. Yesterday I wandered into a bead/jewelry shop and walked out after making a pair of earrings. It was a struggle to feel fairly incompetent when it came to bending some wire but still fun to have a finished product by the end. Sunday I walked around the track talking with a friend until we realized it had been five miles while the hubby played ultimate frisbee. It’s doing these small things that take you out of your comfort zone or routine that lets you dream about so much more. Maybe I’ll make half of our Christmas presents this year. Or maybe it’s time I joined a regular workout class again now that my leg really isn’t as much of a problem anymore. Dreaming opens up other dreams like no TV show ever could. 
Sometimes when I start dreaming about one thing, I realize it’s not actually my dream. Like when I spent a weekend learning all about food trucks or spent a month researching teaching overseas. It’s worthwhile to go down those trails just to find out it’s not your dream. In both cases, I realized what my actual dream was instead. In the case of teaching abroad, it was soon after that we realized we wanted to move but within the U.S. Instead of a food cart, I bought my own url. Right now the dream is to write. Maybe not a book or a billboard, but to write where I’m at. To write about life and hopefully, to help other people through it.  
Whew. That was quite the blog. How that started to get where it ended is somewhat of a mystery. It’s good to be back.

Inspired

Samantha Gratton

When we first started telling friends and family we were moving without much of a plan last year, we got a mix of responses. Some people literally told us we were crazy, others said it was the time in life to do it while still others just gave us a bit of a blank look and wished us luck. What caught me off-guard more than anything was when a few people told us they were inspired. Inspired? Are you sure that’s the emotion you’re feeling?

At the time I felt that what we were doing was a mix of stupidity and courage. Or at least, that’s the story I went with. Simultaneously I was repeatedly trying to talk myself into the crazy scheme and crying every other night with questions, fears and worries. I was kinda freaking out, to put it lightly. Nothing about it seemed inspiring to me. It was confusing and complicated and ridiculous.

A year later, settled (ish) into our new life and home, it’s as if we’ve always been here. Now, someone else is telling the story about how they are changing lives and doing something crazy. There’s excitement and change in the air. Something big is about to happen. And I’m sitting here feeling inspired. Feeling a bit of a nudge to stop sitting back. I want to be a mover and a shaker. It’s time to tap into more of those dreams and goals and kick them into gear.