This morning I was standing over my kitchen sink, looking down at two large, round, ripe pomegranates.
My goal? To dig out their tiny rich red seeds into a big bowl all at once, now, so I could eat them later.
The setting? Houston had a delivered a rare beautiful, cloudless blue sky, soft breezes, chirping (ok shrieking) cockatiel on my shoulder, bright yellow and gold sunshine.
But I didn't see any of that. Because I went to work on those pomegranates like someone was holding a stop watch over me to log my time. I was working away, fast and furiously, getting frustrated when the shy seeds didn't yield themselves out of their protective casings as fast as I wanted them to. I felt angry at times, worried I was "wasting" time on this project when the laptop and a full inbox beckoned.
And then I heard a sound outside that caught my attention, and I looked up for a moment. Caught sight of the blue, blue sky. Took a breath of fresh air. And STOPPED.
What was I rushing for? What on earth was so important that I would miss this rare Houston morning caught up in anger and frustration over POMEGRANATE SEEDS? I realized I had no idea.
Lately I've been wondering what would have happened if Martin Luther King, Jr. had started his famous speech not with "I have a dream" but "I have a goal". This morning, I started out by dreaming of the sweet pomegranate seeds I would eat later in the day. I was happy, full of anticipation, excited for the future, and quite sure it would be a good one. But then I got caught up in my goal of getting the seeds OUT of the rind and where did the happiness, the anticipation, the excitement, the hope go?
In a word - AWAY.
Dreams are about people. Relationships. Patience. Progress. Teamwork.
Goals are about tasks. Comparisons. Impatience. NOW. Me.
For those of you who are thinking, "wow, she sure is way off base about that", I will say that you may be right. But let's just look at what happened when I went back to dreaming about the pomegranate seeds I would eat later, even as I continued to dig them out of the pomegranate rind now.
I began to breathe again. I slowed down. I took my time - I didn't manhandle the delicate seeds, but extracted them gently with the tips of my fingers. The seeds came out more cleanly, retaining their soft shape and juices. The bowl filled at exactly the same rate it had before, but my experience of the task at hand had completely changed. I went from sternly reminding myself that this was why I never buy pomegranates to anticipating my next pomegranate good dream.
One of my mentors was discussing goals with me the other day. He said something so interesting - "goals are a form of dissociation, because they take us out of the now and into the future." And we can't live in the future; we can't do or change anything, including ourselves, when we are living in the future instead of the now. We cannot act upon or change the future, and because our brain can only process now-experiences, we instantly feel frustrated, powerless, helpless, and hopeless when contemplating a big goal that will take time, patience, and persistence in each moment of "now" to accomplish.
But when we dream, we have all the time in the world. We have that patience, that perseverance, that we need to get from now-now to future-now. Dreams help us to retain our sense of "now" and our sense of self-efficacy in the now even as they show us the bigger picture of what we could possibly accomplish in the future. Dreams remind us of what we can do today to include our dreams in our daily choices. Dreams give us time, breathing space, room to grow. And dreams make us happy in ways goals never can or will because dreams are about who we are and the evolution of us, not about what we do and how fast we can do it.
A man like Martin Luther King, Jr., didn't change the world by choosing words carelessly. Every word and every action had a purpose. He chose the word "dream" on purpose - because only this word could take all of us into the future right now, today, one shared dream at a time.
