When I was young, I loved the words from the song “Dreaming” by Johnny Burnett:
Dreamin’, I’m always dreamin’
Dreamin’ love will be mine
The song “Motherless Child” by Richie Havens was my dirge. I never dated in high school. Never went to a dance or prom. I left high school a few months after just narrowly graduating so I could fight the communists in Asia. I had no particular hatred for them. They had never even been much on my mind. But I had no roots. No one to love me. No one who needed me. It was the easiest thing in the world to climb out my back window one night, go over to a friends house and join the military the next day. Only one soul knew where I went. I was not lost and I did not want to be found. I never regretted it.
It was over a year before my parents finally found out that I was now enlisted in the United States Air Force. My father wrote me a letter telling me that he was disowning me. I almost died laughing. He no longer had any influence over my life.
“Sometimes I felt like a motherless child, a long, long way from my home.” It was not always easy feeling alone and unloved. My first wife told the shrink that we saw before getting a divorce that, “I always thought everyone had feelings, but I learned that John has no feelings.”
I thought Spock was too irrational and not logical enough. I wanted to dream and think about the future but the saying “A dream without a plan is worthless” only made me feel incompetent. I could not think of any plans since I had no goals. The only thing I enjoyed doing was reading. I could spend hours in a library just reading anything that caught my fancy. My dreams were all in my books. My books were my best friends.
Still, it was not easy to pass up my dreaming songs. Somehow, if I could not dream, I could at least listen to others who could dream. “All I Have to do is Dream” by the Everly Brothers was another song that seemed to promise that someday I could find true love. Someone who really cared about me. But until then, all I had to do was:
Dream, dream, dream, dream
When I want you in my arms
When I want you and all your charms
Whenever I want you, all I have to do is
It is not easy going through life with only dreams for company. For many years, I thought love was a farce. I could never really attach myself to anyone or anything. It was no wonder that my first marriage ended. I still cannot understand how she stayed with me sixteen years. I look back on the husband and father that I never lived up to being with a great deal of regret and shame. I know I am not the only one stuck with these feelings but even if I knew the entire human race shared these feelings it would not make one bit of difference in terms of the sorrow I feel. “Get over it, I have been told.” “Forgive yourself and move on.” So easy to say.
Another dreaming song which I can still hear even when it is not being played is “Dream On” by Aerosmith. What struck me about their song Dream On was not just the music but the idea that dreaming itself was a form of survival.
Sing with me, if it’s just for today
Maybe tomorrow, the good Lord will take you away
Dream on
Dream on
Hard to believe that a teenager wrote these lyrics about life, success, and death finally coming to take it all away. But as long as we can keep on dreaming, we have something that neither God nor Satan can take from us. We need a dream which can be the vision that the Bible says people perish without.
Years later I discovered Viktor Frankl. Based on his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp, Victor Frankl wrote a book about survival in the Nazi Concentration Camps called “Man’s Search for Meaning.” He wrote that without meaning, we have no anchors in our lives. Nothing to live for. He argued that people survive through meaning. This was perhaps his most original idea.
Looking back, I realized that books had given me meaning before I ever found purpose.
When people lose a sense of purpose, they often experience what Frankl called an “existential vacuum”—feelings of emptiness, boredom, or despair.
But Frankl did not mention dreaming. Many of us find meaning or purpose in our lives by dreaming. My mother believed that some day she would win the lottery and we would all be rich. My sister dreamed of a better life since she insisted that she was really a princess who had been kidnapped by my pedophile dad.
In his “Dream Lovers”, Bobbie Darin put the words in my soul into a hit song:
Every night I hope and pray
I want a dream lover
So I don’t have to dream alone
I titled this blog, “When Dreaming is Not Enough.”
We can dream all day long, but will it really be enough to have a happy life. I cannot imagine a life without some dreams to live for but when does dreaming stop and life begin?
Can dreaming stop us from having the life we want to live by substituting fantasies for actions that we need to take?
Dreaming sustained me when I had little else. It carried me through lonely years, failed relationships, and unanswered questions. But dreams alone could never give me the life I wanted.
The people in my life—my first wife, my second wife, military friends, college friends, and friends from work—all helped move me closer to the life I wanted to live. Years of counseling helped me get rid of my OCD. Books taught me what life could be like for me. I no longer had a death wish that seemed to go continually unanswered.
At some point, every dream demands a choice. We can keep dreaming about love, purpose, friendship, or a better future—or we can take the risk of pursuing our dreams.
Dreams are where life begins.
Action is where life happens.
Chorus:
One day, when the old man was out walking, he saw a woman who had been beaten and thrown into a ditch. Around her neck, was hung a sign which said “Beware, Witch.” Without even a slight hesitation, the old man ran to the ditch to see how he could help the woman. He gave her some water and bread that he had on him for lunch and tried to bind up some of her wounds by ripping up his cloak. She looked at the old man with compassion and said “No one is ever kind to me, but you have been. I have this monkey’s paw that I would like you to have. It will grant you three wishes. However, be careful. Be very careful. Wishes can often result in things that you do not really want.” The woman handed him a gnarled dried up old paw and bidding a farewell, walked on down the road. He put the paw in his pocket and walked on to his home.
When the old man arrived home, he told his wife what had happened. She immediately asked to see the paw. Upon, looking at it, Marie said “Shall we try it.” The old man laughed and said, “You don’t really believe in such magic, do you?” “What do we have to lose,” said his wife. So they both picked up the paw and together made the following wish: “We wish we had enough money to never have to worry about food or clothes or other necessities for the rest of our lives.” They waited and waited and suddenly both began to laugh. Such foolishness and they were silly enough to think that it might be real.
They went to bed feeling sad, miserable, and as unhappy as any two human beings could be. Later that night, they heard a scuffling coming up the path to their door. It sounded like something was being dragged. A knock sounded on their door, but they were both too afraid to move. A voice cried out “Mom, dad, it is Eli your son. I have come back. I am alive.” Almost too happy to describe, they bolted for the door. Upon opening it to let Eli in, they recoiled in horror. Eli did not look human. His skin was in tatters. His legs and arms were mere bones. His face was a skull with bits of skin and dried blood hanging off it. “Let me in, I have come back from the grave. You have summoned me. Let me in.” 
Meaning and purpose are Yin and Yang to each other. Purpose is outside you and is what you do in the world. For me purpose involves doing. Meaning is inside you and what you do for yourself. Meaning involves being rather than doing. Let’s use a running race as an example.
Meaning in my dictionary is about living up to my potential, my values and my beliefs by doing the best I can each day to be consistent with them. No one may ever know if I am being kind, compassionate or patient today. You cannot see the inner virtues that I want to live by. I am the only person at the end of each day who can judge whether or not my life had any meaning today. If I can be the best person that I want to be each day, I will die feeling that my life had meaning. To the rest of the world, I may just be another old teacher, old veteran or old guy who lived an average life and died at an average age. Meaning to me is about being and not doing.
If I answer, I want to be rich, my meaning in life will be defined by how I go about becoming rich and what I do with my money. If I want to be a writer, my meaning will be defined by what I write and how I go about the writing process. If I want to be happy, my meaning in life will be defined by how I go about achieving happiness. No one except me can judge how I define myself. People may say that I am not very rich or that I am not a very good writer, but it is what I believe about myself which will define my meaning in life. Vincent Van Gogh is now widely regarded as one of the greatest painters of all time. His paintings sell for millions of dollars. However, in his lifetime, he sold only one painting. It was to his sister-in-law who felt sorry for him.
“What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.” — 
I conclude with the consideration that Meaning and Purpose may not be everyone’s cup of tea. I confess that it was much later in my life and many hurdles had been taken and many obstacles overcome before I started caring about the meaning and purpose of life. Now I look back and shake my head with some sorrow that I did not grasp their import on life when I was in my teens. A have learned that a life without meaning and purpose is not a life, it is just living.
January 1st– the beginning of a New Year. This is the time when many of us will make new resolutions, new dreams, new goals and promises galore. It is a time when we will begin over and try to make wishes come true that did not work out the year before. We bring in the New Year as a mother brings in a newborn baby, full of promise and youth. There are those critics and skeptics who look at the inevitable human trail of broken dreams and unfulfilled goals from bygone years and laugh at our efforts. Such people deny the possibility of hope and change. I may often be a pessimist but for any of you with the courage to tackle a new set of goals or dreams, I say “try, try, and try again.”
Aging Capriciously 