There Is No Dream

there are only choices, and that's beautiful | PODCAST

Note: A link to a podcast between myself and creator Andrea Maurer for both Spotify and Youtube can be found at the end of this post.

It’s probably a consequence of living an untypical life, of being an artist living and working in Europe. But I’ve heard, many times over, “You’re living my dream.”

It might be spoken with kindness, with astonishment, or sometimes envy. My answer is consistent. And because I’ve never had a bucket list, or even come close to mapping out anything that’s actually happened to me in advance, I try not to get annoyed or put off by the statement.

locks on a bridge in Hamburg - the dreams of lovers from all over the world

There are no dreams. Let me tell you why.

In the hubris of the pernicious global situation that’s scorching our earth and destabilizing everything we hold dear, we’re led by the global marketing machine down the path of manufactured dreams. Dreams that can get us out of the rat race, the insidious boredom; dreams that get us to part with our money in return for the intoxicating promise of emotional fulfillment. We need to believe that Stevie and Bruce are right: it’s about the dream and dancing in the dark, and we can have it all and do anything we can dream of.

Meanwhile, we’re collectively trying to make sense of the catastrophic chaos that we face head-on as soon as we turn on any device. The chaos that’s telling us it’s the hottest summer in the history of summers, and there won’t be enough crops this year to feed the industrial meat industry’s billions of sickly animals, much less ourselves. The chaos that’s changing the price at the gas tank and the airport and the grocery store every time we blink. The complete lack of control we feel is terrifying, because it upends the long-standing paradigm that we ever really had control at all.

A life that’s consciously led thousands of miles from the epicenter of late-stage capitalism, in places that seem so damn good and that ride the line between business and creativity (as we’ve been doing for over twenty years now), really does look like a dream.

I totally get that.

The truth of the situation is much more pragmatic. We were offered choices that enabled us to make large moves to different places, and we took them. What we didn’t do was shy away. I will never regret moving from Philadelphia to Washington to southern California, back to Philadelphia and then to Europe. But I’m not going to sit here and say any of that was a dream, either. Each move required the acceptance of a more than healthy dose of risk and an abundant willingness to adapt, change, and grow—whether we wanted to or not.

We make choices. And choices always carry consequences—some of them positive and some of them not so much. The more we explore, become curious, and stick our necks out of the safety of our own blinders, opportunities present themselves. With opportunities come decisions, some that will bring you down a slightly different path, some that can turn your entire world upside down and have you learning a new language while on your back heels, trying to understand public transportation links in a foreign country.

There’s so much I’ve learned by making the choices I have. Choices on new jobs, on love, on big moves. I can whip up a set of curtains for a new house in a day if I have to. There’s no issue with getting the lay of the land in a new place, fresh off the plane, with or without GPS. My own brain power tripled by learning languages. There’s no way in hell I would have learned a foreign language, let alone two, had I not fallen in love with a German and moved to Europe. I would still be one of those Americans that says, “Well, I took Spanish in high school….”

Cringe.

But none of that—not one single iota—was a dream.

Life on this side of the ocean, doing massive historic renovation projects and being a ceramic artist with a long list of clients, might sound terribly romantic. The reality is there are many boring everyday moments that are filled with dirty dishes, broken pottery out of the kiln and a garden parched beyond belief. There’s anxiety about where the world is heading and about health issues and how my family in the States will cope and all the other things that every other person in this crazy world obsesses about.

There have been so many magical moments thatt’s easy to forget how isolated and humiliating it felt to understand only a handful of German words and turn involuntarily into an insecure shadow of myself after having been a glib, expressive marketing executive in the USA. The lessons have been huge. There has been plenty of trauma to get past. But there was always a path forward—the next step, a crack of light, a new grasp of grammar, friends at language school, incredibly people along the way.

It’s easy to forget the panic that hit the day we bought our first Italian property. The day we signed the papers on our first property in Italy—a literal pile of stones—I didn’t eat for three weeks. The fear was so intense it landed me in the hospital. That was a clear and unmistakable consequence of choice. But I got better, because I had help and love in my life. I leaned into that heavily when I needed to.

Running the bed and breakfast on a hill in Italy seems terribly romantic but there was no heady dream that could make it less work. We made breakfast for strangers all spring, summer, and fall, then spent the winter chipping plaster off walls. Guests there, no renovation. Guests gone, renovation. It was hard work. But it built something in me that no corporate job ever did: a stubborn trust in my own capacity to do what was necessary to survive and make every attempt at thriving against what sometimes felt like insurmountable odds.

Struggling to live with the consequences of one’s own choices builds character and endless ways to express creativity in real, authentic ways.

I have never felt that I’m living a dream. I’ve chosen for this life, again and again. There’s beauty in that.

Dreams are passive. They happen to you; actually, they’re often sold to you. Choices are active. They require you to show up, to weigh consequences, to decide how to move forward. And even though you never can know what the exact consequences will be, you will be sure to learn things you never could have dreamed of—ever.

By understanding that life choices are not dreams, I won agency and backbone. I started asking, “What choice is in front of me? What am I willing to take on?” That shift didn’t make my life one bit easier, but it made it more authentic. And because of that, in my opinion, more beautiful.

I talk about this—creative breadcrumbs, burnout, feeling damaged, and why I hate the word “hobby”—in a recent conversation with Andrea Maurer on her podcast, Flying Under the Radar. If any of this resonates, I’d love for you to listen.

Spotify:

YouTube:

And if you’re standing at your own crossroads—renovation, move, new love, creative leap, book project—I’d love to hear: what choice are you making right now, and what consequences are you willing to live with?

There is no dream.
There are only choices—and that’s just so beautiful.