I used to be a planner. In the fifth grade, I was looking at course catalogs for collegiate marine biology programs in Honolulu. I knew the adventures I would embark upon, the trajectory of my career, the precise date I would get married to a paper doll placeholder, the type of house I was going to make my home.
But, if there is one thing I have learned in the years that have unfolded since then, it’s that there is a huge difference between planning - and dreaming.
Plans are fragile. They’re rigid and they shatter as easily as porcelain when things like promises are dropped.
Dreams, on the other hand, create a picture - an artistic landscape of days to come that leaves room for interpretation, for deviation, for variation - for change.
Dreaming is an art that leaves space for our breath to be taken away and for the unimaginable to give us what we need the most, even on the occasions where it is what we want the least.
Dreaming allows us to pull in the colors of yesterday to blend with our hopes of tomorrow - creating meaning to be found in the middle. Each new chapter is cream-colored canvas, stretched on a scaffold, open and precocious in its becoming, and only reached for when we are ready. Dreaming allows us to be intentional about who we are becoming, little by little, day by day.
Of course, we’ve all heard that “some things never change.” I always believed that love was simply one of things, but I was wrong.
Love is alive, and therefore it has to change - to grow like roots beneath our feet that tangle us together as we reach for the light. When love stays still and stagnant, it just isn’t love anymore.
So, maybe the very things that “never change," are exactly the things that change the very most - the things that dreams hold space for. We just have to make the conscious and reiterative choice to let them grow.
I am learning not to plan my life away, but instead, to dream - to make space for things like love to change and grow into something more beautiful than I ever could have originally imagined them to be.
I am learning not to plan, but to paint.