I had a dream last night. It was not a happy dream. I won’t say it was sad, though it was most certainly that, but sad, to me, is much more devastating than not happy. I guess what I mean to say is that, though not happy, it was moving. It got me thinking. And that’s never sad.
As most dreams go, it was disjointed, and half based in reality, half some fantasy or alternate world. It was disjointed, and I could not even tell you if everyone looked as they really do or not, but we were all clearly who I perceived us to be.
In the dream, a good friend of my family had passed away, and we were all devastated, I extremely so, for some reason. My sister was in charge of, or perhaps was guardian of this person’s baby, along with her own. The ancillary characters in the story are not important, and I don’t even remember who else was there.
At any rate, the only other person in the dream that I remember was my wife. She told me, at one point, that she sometimes walks by a friend’s apartment after work, just hoping that her friend would, for some reason, still be there.
You must understand that just dreaming, for me, is a rare occurrence. I know that scientists say we dream every night, but if that’s the case 99% of my dreams get such bad screenings on the way to the main room in my brain that I don’t even remember them. But this was different, I think. I think I had this dream because of an ongoing conversation I’ve been having with some people over moving and having kids. It’s the fear of change, and that we lose something when things change.
And the fact is, we do. You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. And that’s a wonderful thing, I think. Oh, I know we’d all rather realize exactly what we’ve got, and worship it, adore it. But the fact is, we don’t. Out of the 10% of us out here who actually think, care and worry about our fellow human beings, how many of us actually stop to ENJOY what we are doing, right now? How many of us, like KV’s Uncle Alex, stop and say “If this isn’t nice, what is?”
Fact is, we NEED for things to change in order to make us realize that things WERE nice. “If that wasn’t nice, what is?” could be the phrase.
It would be great, astounding, to be able to stop, look around us and realize just how wonderful things are, and how much we tend to fuck them up by getting caught up on little, stupid minutia. And that’s what my dream was about. And that’s what life should be about. The clichés are around for a reason, I guess.
We could all take a lesson from change, and from all the people that have wandered in and out of our lives over the years. Some people remain a constant part of us, some don’t. But we can’t wait for something to leave to appreciate it.
If this isn’t nice, what is?