Reflections: Resuming my writing dream (category of. dream hopes, wishes)

Sunday Scribblings

One stranger's hazy fight for her dreams reached mine when I struggled to recover from a recent despondency.

In analysing my somewhat dishevelled emotions that sprouted from a subtle catastrophe and its straggly remnants, I remembered a scene from the television when I was about 10 years old and which now made a furious impact on me.

A Canadian lady went to visit a therapist and replay her story of sadness.

She spotted long blonde hair that fell over her face in neat straight lines, dressed stylishly and often looked wistful and pensive, if not more than a little thoughtful. The background music was close to Joan Baez's guitarwork or the Beatles' rendition of Norwegian Wood. Something like that.

She was obviously struggling to get over a terrible disappointment and with each session, recalled a little more of her painful story to the sympathic professional listener.

The documentary traced the progress of her emotional journey, through her everyday life in her apartment. She listened to music, cooked and shopped. She lived alone at the time. Isn't it funny how the mind captures an individual's intense observation with more clarity than one tries to remember and in later years can draw in the scene with a sharper vision than the television could ever have produced.

And so now in the summer of my own years, I suddenly remembered.

What struck me most was the last episode of this old documentary. The lady was smiling.

Still in her long ponytail, she stood on the balcony, arranging her newly-potted plants. She had bought her ferns to announce a solitary celebration. She then went down to the street to view her handiwork. She smiled and smiled. This is the scene I recall vividly: her grace in an animated pleasure.

She had been to see the therapist for the last time.

And much as that specialist had been a confidante, this lady knew she was well enough never to go back. She was pleased. She looked forward to a future with her dreams in place, whatever they may have been.

I remember the narrator said that she had been, for the last time and had come to accept her realities for what they were and she was once more, tasting joy.
The vision reflected her exuberant radiance while contemplating all kinds of plans.

It showed her meeting with friends, her own problems either hidden or sufficient enough to have dwarfed so as to have vanished. It showed her in conversation and laughter, winning through a battle of the self.

Today, I woke up, feeling like that woman. Isn't time a wonderful medicine for the heart and mind if one always stays honest to the self.
Sometimes, things happen and we have to live through the grief.
But then suddenly, there is an easy ability to come to terms with illusive complications. Today, I was thinking eagerly of the future again, moving on steadily towards my own dream journey for writing and publication.

In trying to recapture my dreams, I felt this stranger hold my hand.

Now, I am finally able to write both my stage play and novel, shifting from one to the other with relish. They seem a little distant from me, detached and almost as if I have to visit my own writings.
Yet that worked wonderfully well.

My writings were not distracted from any recent ordeal. The characters are still alive and impatiently tugging at my jeans.

I felt that the striking memory of this Canadian lady offered me an enormous silent comfort and that I was now able to move on, to open new doors for myself, to close old ones, to leave the bad and the sad behind and to follow my dreams eagerly into the future. Which, I'm just about to do after a time of silence.