Lately my 12 year old child has had questions about his purpose in life. I asked him about his dreams and goals. It also made me wonder:
What happens to childhood dreams?
Maybe some become clouds that gently float away.
Maybe some are hand-painted signs that fade with time.
Maybe some stay seeds in the garden of our souls.
With luck, pluck and resources some seeds grow and bloom.
Some grow out of control and need to be pulled.
While others are forgotten and are covered by weeds; quiescent, dormant.
They are still there.
What were your childhood dreams? What became of them?
***
I’ve had childhood dreams of all kinds. I’ve had long-forgotten ones that became clouds…being a gymnast or dancer or theater performer. Dreams that have faded out and I have long journeyed past are ones like opening a stationery store, running a bakery and teaching elementary school. And then there are the dreams that are still around, dormant in the garden of my soul, buried by the weeds of career ambition and material accumulation. Fortunately, some of these dreams are hardy and patient. They have waited 40 years for me to notice their unattended patch of garden, looking forward to the time when I get down and dirty to pull the weeds, nurture the soil and give them water, sun and love.
When I was little, I was free to wander and explore our little town after school. This was a lucky byproduct of living in a relatively safe neighborhood and some benign neglect: parents who were always at work and school and a grandmother preoccupied with my baby siblings at home. As long as I showed up for dinner and ate everything in my bowl, the grownups were satisfied.
I benefited greatly from this freedom. Some days I went to my friends’ homes and hung out. Some days I sat in patches of plants and looked for interesting flowers and leaves and bugs and mushrooms and 4-leaf clovers. Then I brought some home to draw or make something out of them. The nice old lady whose backyard was next to ours let me take a shortcut through her fence, but only if I stopped in and chatted over tea and cookies. I happily obliged, and she told me stories that I couldn’t quite follow but I loved afternoon tea with her anyway.
Wandering taught me some important lessons:
- The world around us is full of wonders, big and small.
- We can create cool things out of things we find in nature.
- People can be very kind and generous. Including strangers.
At that age, my dream was to write and illustrate my own book. Something colorful, fantastical and funny, like the worlds I conjured up in my mind when I read my favorite stories. I was overjoyed when my favorite teacher presented me awards in art and creative writing at my elementary school graduation. When I brought the awards home and proudly showed my parents, I was told that art and creative writing were useless and meaningless diversions. These interests were not going to get me a good job. I found my artwork in the trash. I was crushed.
We moved to a “better school district” for my middle school years. I had a terrible time at a hyper-competitive, achievement-oriented school. I gave up on art and creative writing. I pushed myself in math and science. In the process, another dream was born.
Thanks to my parents’ encouragement and financial support, as well as high-enough test scores, I had the incredible good fortune to participate in a middle school summer camp focused on marine ecology. Our teachers were passionate scientists who loved to share the wonders of the underwater world. I wanted to be like them and dreamed of visiting the Great Barrier Reef.
We moved again, this time to a farming town in California’s Central Valley. My high school was very working class, very chill and down-to-earth… a welcome relief. As I moved through adolescence, I started replacing my childhood dreams with goals that were increasingly more “useful.” My dreams of becoming an ecologist were replaced by goals to be a social worker, and then to become a doctor. That last dream checked all the adult requirements: becoming a physician was interesting,challenging, and potentially good for the world, and above all, had the job and financial security my parents so badly wanted for me.
For the next 24 years, all things related to becoming and being a doctor took over much of my life. I loved getting to know my patients over many years. It was a great privilege to earn their trust around very sensitive and vulnerable aspects of their lives. I also loved working with an incredible dedicated and values-driven community in HIV public health. We share dreams of ending the HIV epidemic, of building better health care systems, of providing truly compassionate care for everyone.
I spent so much time and effort on my career that the rest of my soul garden became overgrown. My childhood dreams, personal relationships and health kept getting buried under decades of overwork. Several years ago, my body started rebelling and telling me to clean up my garden. Its urgency was given several exclamation points in the form of swollen joints that stopped me from working. Ignoring my health and the rest of my garden was no longer a choice.
So, I’ve been weeding and watering. It’s slow and sometimes painful work. First, I’ve had to survey my garden and decide what plants to keep and what to pull. Weeds are subjective things. I’ve decided to keep mentoring, coaching, strategizing, travel and exploration. I’ve decided that clinical medicine, administration and accumulating possessions and titles have reached the end of their useful lives and need to be pulled and composted. They served me well for the past few decades. It’s time for me to turn over my garden and water other seeds and buds: creative art, writing and ecology.
Earlier this year I made a plan to retire from my career in clinical medicine and ramp up my art and writing. Still stuck in my workaholic mindset, the plan for my creative life was filled with concrete goals, finished products and quantifiable outcome metrics. Then I spent the summer visiting Oceania, including the Great Barrier Reef, nurturing my dream to explore the ecological wonders of the world. When I came back, my heart felt heavy staring at the work plan, overwhelmed by all the goals and metrics for finished products. I started to force myself to write and make stuff, but the pressure to make everything polished and posted paralyzed me. I had once again let the weeds of productivity and ambition bury my creativity.
“The plants have changed but the gardener has not,” my partner astutely observed.
I had changed what plants I paid attention to in the garden of my soul, but not how I take care of them. My work plans are great for achieving project goals and implementing new practices in health care settings. They give me dopamine hits when I check off the boxes. But they’re not great at inspiring art and writing. Nor for my personal health and relationships, which have become increasingly important and time-intensive as I’ve aged. I’m slowly learning that I need a lot more space to recover and repair. To honor these needs, I must learn more relaxed ways to garden, to write and make art.
“Give yourself permission to be a bad artist,” writer and artist Suleika Jaouad has said in response to someone who was hesitant to create something.
That’s my new plan: to let myself be a bad artist. And a bad gardener. By letting go of expectations, I find more freedom and space to experiment and make lots of mistakes- the compost needed for my childhood dreams to grow. The soil will be richer, the roots will run deeper, and the water and sun will have more time to do its magic in the garden of my soul.