When our dreams are at a distance

what to remember and a beautiful question from Anne Lamott that I can't stop thinking about

I’m back from Yosemite and promise to stop talking about John Muir. But one last thing.

In my annual Muir deep dive, I learned something new. I was reading a brief bio and came across this tidbit:

“In 1880, he married Louie Wanda Strentzel and moved to Martinez, California , where they raised their two daughters, Wanda and Helen. Settling down to some measure of domestic life, Muir went into partnership with his father-in-law and managed the family fruit ranch with great success.”

The article continues:

“In later years he turned more seriously to writing, publishing 300 articles and 10 major books that recounted his travels, expounded his naturalist philosophy, and beckoned everyone to "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings."”

To summarize: Muir had been in the High Sierras for about a decade and he’d had initial success with writing and advocacy. Then, at age 42 he gets married and settles down in the Bay Area. Muir works on the family farm and raises kids and it’s not until his “later years” that he gets prolific with his writing.

He continues to travel during this period on the farm, though I can’t help but notice he’s 150 miles away from his beloved mountain range. I know next to nothing about transportation in the late 1800s, but I’m guessing he wasn’t headed into the High Sierras every other weekend.

I bring this up not to say that putting off your Dream Project is a great approach, but instead as a reminder that life has seasons. Muir was still taking trips during this period and these travels would become the subject of future books. My guess is he was still tinkering on his theories about how glaciers carved out the mountain valleys. But it would be a mistake not to note that this period of his life was different. He was not exploring the wilderness. He was working on a farm. 

Around the time I made this discovery about Muir, I was reading Anne Lamott’s new book, Somehow. In the book there’s a beautiful essay about time spent with a terminally ill friend and Lamott poses a question that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I read it:

“I scare myself with recreational morbidity by wondering when will my last day come, and if I will be very afraid. But these are the wrong questions to ponder…the question is how do you notice your own life force now?”

How do you notice your own life force now?

By life force, I think Lamott means your heart, love and energy. This question made me stop and look around (which maybe is the entire point?). It made me recognize where energy is flowing. The problem isn’t that I’m not doing enough. The hard part is coming to terms with the fact that in this season of life energy is flowing differently than it has in the past. And, honestly, the flow of energy to my Dream Project is merely a trickle at the moment. But the total outflow? Holy smokes, there’s so much.

In that moment in Yosemite, my answer to the answer was chasing my toddler as he chases squirrels. Oohing and aahing at the river rocks he presents to me and then flings into the water. Introducing him to the It’s-It and watching his brows furrow as he tries to make sense of the delight that is strawberry ice cream. Right here. It’s not big and it’s not a mountaintop. But it’s mine and it’s fleeting and it’s now. 

I wonder how Muir felt when he left the Sierras and spent a decade on the family farm. After some initial success with his writing, did he doubt himself when he got married and settled down? Did he feel like a sellout when he managed a ranch? Did he berate himself for not spending more time on his writing and research?

What I want to remember is that even though John Muir stepped out of the Sierras and onto a farm for a decade, he still became John Muir. His example calls into question the notion of being “all in” and shows us that even though life sometimes yanks us out of the path of our dreams, we can still get where we’re going.

With any luck, life is long. If you find yourself answering the question above with a response that has very little to do with your Dream Project, you’re not alone. Same for Muir. Same for me.

This is a season. It’s not forever and Lamott reorients us:

“I have been with many people who were dying, and what is revealed besides the worry is all that they loved, both what they will miss and what still fills and feeds them…Those ornate ordinary times, the grip of a hand as you walk up the trail to the car, laughing in spite of it all, vanilla pudding.”

Those ornate ordinary times.

The dream may not feel nearby. So here’s what we do when the mountains are calling and we can’t go: we pause and notice why. We stop and look around. We acknowledge where we are showing up. We take stock of “what still fills and feeds.” 

Only a tiny trickle of energy might be flowing towards our Dream Projects. That’s okay for this season. There is life and heart here and now. We may not be climbing at the moment, but my god what a view.

Become a paid subscriber

Give yourself permission to do something for the fun of it. Brainstorm Road’s paid subscribers encourage each other each week with our High Five Friday weekly thread. And you get access to daily prompts designed to get you out of perfectionism and rekindling your creativity and fun. Come join us.