Keep Dreaming

It seems that over the last two years everybody has lost sight of their dreams. The pandemic has put us all into survival mode. It’s becoming harder and harder to make money and tensions rise as there seems to be no end in sight.

Everywhere we turn people are bickering, angry, afraid, and hopeless as we sit on the brink of a third world war.

Society has spun out of control.

Medium Creators have presented us with a challenge for the month of April. To be honest, I’m not sure if it is exactly a challenge or just a suggestion to help get our creative juices flowing. Either way, it holds the potential to help us change our mindset if we choose to accept it. You can read about it here.

It tied in quite nicely with the headspace I’m in right now. You see, that’s the space that I need most to declutter this Spring.

This is where all change or renewal truly begins. We need to plant the seeds of change in our minds and then nurture those seeds until they grow into the life we want for ourselves. We need to weed out the distractions and focus on what is truly important to us.

Once upon a time, I was quite goal-oriented, I kept a busy routine and felt like I was accomplishing a lot on any given day. Then my world came smashing down around me in a series of unfortunate events, some of which you can read about here:

In all that I have been through and all that I have seen in these past few years, not once have I wanted to quit. That’s not to say that the thought of giving up hasn’t crossed my mind. I just refused to give that line of thought any space in my head.

Unfortunately, for most of the last few years, I’ve had to fight just to get through the mundane tasks of each day. There were days that I couldn’t even do that.

There hasn’t been much in the way of forward movement. It would be far too easy to get caught up in beating myself up or crying over what did or didn’t get done. But what’s the point in that? It won’t get things done and it certainly isn’t going to get me any closer to where I want to be.

Regardless of what I do or don’t do time moves on. There’s no turning back the clock to give yourself a chance for a do-over, or just more time to get ‘er done.

That’s not to say that I never got caught up in negative thought cycles. There have definitely been times that just getting through each day was overwhelming. Hell, I fought depression for months. It wasn’t that I wanted to give up on my life or my dreams, I just couldn’t bring myself to do anything.

My mind had somehow derailed. I was bombarded with thoughts, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t organize them enough to motivate me to move.

I finally asked my doctor for help with escaping the relentless, dark, all-consuming depression I was in, I told him that I needed to get back to grabbing the bull by the horns. It wasn’t like me at all to just lie down and let life run me over. I just couldn’t get myself up.

He referred me for counseling and gave me anti-depressants. The medication made me want to sleep all of the time. That was certainly not going to help me break out of my funk.

Counseling wasn’t all that helpful either. It seldom is when you know that in reality, your life is pretty damn good compared to a lot of other people and that your feelings are valid, normal even.

When your counselor keeps telling you that they would love to have your life, even if just for a brief holiday, and so would a lot of other people, it doesn’t move you out of depression. It filled me with guilt for reaching out in the first place.

I already know that we are living the dream, but it’s a dream that takes a lot of work to maintain. Both of us are getting older and maintenance is getting hard.

That doesn’t mean we pack it and give up on our dream!

We’ve had to adapt.

We’ve been forced to admit that our bodies just can’t do all the things that they used to. That sucks! It hurts, emotionally and physically.

That doesn’t mean that we are going to just stop living our dream. It just means that we’ve had to change things up a little bit. We just needed to adapt!

My husband and I both love getting outside and tending to our land and animals. I’m pretty sure that if you moved us into a lovely senior's home we’d both quickly die of boredom and simply from missing this life we’ve come to love.

In coming to accept the fact that we won’t always be able to do all the things we once could we have had to make some modifications.

Already we’ve both had to slow down our pace and give up some things. Mind you those ended up being things that, although we hadn’t minded so much in our younger days, they’d started sucking the joy out of our day-to-day living. You know… things like working for someone else.

It’s a little bit scary before you take that leap. Once you realize that you don’t need to have someone else’s signature on a paycheck every couple of weeks, it’s ultimately freeing.

We’re learning that people will actually pay us to do things we like to do. We don’t really need a lot to get by.

So as we move into Spring and a time of growth, I’m looking at decluttering my mind of all those things that I once thought were so important.

It’s funny how sometimes focusing on the really little things in life can make us realize that we have a lot to be thankful for.

For a long time now I haven’t had any huge accomplishments. It’s the little things though that have added up to something I can be happy about. We’re still here, on the farm, surrounded by all that we love.

We have a reason to get up and get moving each and every day. Best of all is the fact that we get to choose which direction we’ll move, or if we even have to move at all.

This story was originally published on Medium.