It seems to me that I meet the word ‘dream’ everywhere I turn these days. Women are to have their dream weddings, people are to move into their dream homes, and young people are to find their dream jobs. I assume by this it is meant that the dreamed item will be perfect. That is an awful lot to ask of a wedding, a house or a job.
I have three daughters and as a result have put on three weddings. While all three were wonderful celebrations, it is the mishaps that we laugh over all these years later. The get-away car that never came, the wedding dress zipper that broke and was fixed by a determined father-of-the-bride with pliers, and the sheets of rain that fell on the big day. None of these would be considered to be an integral part of a dream wedding.
As for the dream house, as far as I am concerned that would be a house with no running toilets, self-cleaning abilities, and a mortgage that paid itself. I have yet to come across one of those. And to promise a young person a dream job is probably the most unkind thing society can do. Of course they can find meaningful work, but no one on the planet can say that their job, no matter how much liked, has ever been a daily dream.
And here is an interesting fact. Have you ever heard anyone, including AARP, refer to your dream old age? Now retirement communities try to project this image with pictures of trim, attractive people with full heads of graying hair strolling down beaches hand in hand, smiling to beat the band. Those of us with the perhaps not so thick heads of gray hair are not buying it. And neither are the still young who are resolutely looking away from it all. Perhaps that is why society is desperate to ignore this stage of life. It is where the dreams seem to end.
But let’s look for a moment at one of the definitions of dream according to Webster. It is “a state of mind marked by abstraction or a release from reality.” Perhaps one of the gifts of arriving at a certain time of life is that one has only reality left. And is that so bad? For now we can look back over our lives with no expectation of perfection, but with an acceptance and gratitude of all the good that has sprouted up and thrived amongst the tares of daily living.