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My wildest dreams defy conformity
A phrase I hear a lot lately is beyond your wildest dreams.
I have been hearing it a lot in the context of the law of attraction. It often comes up in Facebook wall posts and link-sharing. It is popular with life coaches and seminar leaders who cheer us on to create the proverbial good life.
Find a career beyond your wildest dreams. Find a relationship beyond your wildest dreams. Live like a king and queen in a lifestyle beyond your wildest dreams. Make your wildest dreams your reality.
Hug from the soul
Have you ever hugged someone for a whole minute? A whole, long, no-cheating sixty ticks?
That might sound like a piece of cake, especially if you envision or remember hugging the love of your life or if your minute-long hugs were simply a prelude to steamier activities. But what about hugging a friend or relative or (gasp!) even a stranger for a whole minute?
I’d love to see the changes that would occur in our society if we made hugging more prominent and acceptable. I’m not referring to the fleeting body collisions many people in our culture produce for the occasion (“give” would be the wrong word here). You know, the A-frame, don’t blink or you’ll miss it phenomenon.
I’m talking about a true connection, a long pause at the traffic light of time to hold someone in your arms and be present with that person for a whole minute. Hug that person with reverence and respect and empathy. Hug as a prayer and give thanks for our existence by taking the unusual step of holding a kindred soul close.
Making connections on Facebook
When I first began playing on Facebook I took the term “friends” much more in harmony with my own love of real-life friendship. A friend was someone I knew, liked, and shared intimately with, by which I mean share our life stories and our feelings in an authentic way.
I didn’t feel right making friends on Facebook with people who weren’t real-life friends. It just seemed weird. But I discovered that I quickly maxed out on people I knew in real life to be friends with and many of my real-life friends didn’t hang on Facebook nor were they that crazy about email correspondence.
Friendship is the bridge to another soul
Whenever I see It’s a Wonderful Life and get to the ending that never fails to make me teary-eyed, despite knowing exactly what’s coming, I still find myself both nodding and cringing at the part about no man is a failure who has friends. It tugs at my heart because close friendships have been rare in my life.
How do I explain this? How do I rationalize this? Most important, how do I overcome it?
The idea of true friendship has always been powerful for me, yet ever since encountering the famous sentence “Let’s just be friends” from girls back in high school, I recognized that as a culture we don’t think much of the institution of friends. “Just friends” is an insult, a buy-down, a limiting of a relationship. But then “more than friends” usually means becoming lovers and in a strange way, sex sometimes inhibits intimacy. Lovers frequently keep secrets from one another as a strategy for not rocking the emotional boat with confessions or sharing their vulnerabilities. The result is that lovers are often less intimate than friends and the sex that lovers have is often more like acting in a movie than being real.
In my last blog I wrote about my disappointment in how conversations with blood relatives or adopted families are frequently superficial and often characterized by secrets and lies. I grew up thinking that families should somehow be primary support systems where you could talk about anything from agony to ecstasy.
I have seen very few models of that kind of openness in real life.
But it goes beyond that. I think in general that we are an intimacy-phobic culture. We are trained to be aloof, defensive, surface, catty, and in many cases, mindless (as opposed to mindful.) We are taught that if we are too open to someone, we’ll get hurt.
Is that being cynical and critical? I’m not trying to be. I am trying to express my inner hunger for intimacy and involvement.
So often I feel I have to censor my thoughts in conversations with people. If I have to do a lot of mind-editing, I am not being intimate. Further, it is quite exhausting to spend so much time monitoring every thought and having it rubber-stamped as ACCEPTED or REJECTED by my internal standards and practices board.
If I were actually in control of my universe, I would merge friendship and business. I would treat my clients as friends. I would work for them as if I wanted to please them, because that’s exactly what I would want from people with whom I do business. I would knock myself out for their happiness because isn’t that what a great friend would do for you? Isn’t that what I would want?
This actually is the model I follow in my personal universe. I can’t really do it any other way because that is who I am. I come from a very service-oriented background. My father was a school superintendent and very much a humanitarian. Most of my jobs have been related to service. I don’t really have the genetics nor experience for ripping people off as a way of life.
As Jolene often says, “I want to make a living, not a killing.”
