a pragmatic dreamer
Monthly Update: Birthday Edition, April 2024
April has a special place in my heart. When I go outside I’m met by a waft of fragrant blooming trees. Colours and vibrancy return to the surroundings. As I walk home in the evenings, newly awake flying insects bump into my forehead, clearly disoriented and half-asleep still. In other words, spring is here, evidently so.
What probably makes April special for me is the fact that it’s the month I was born. I love that there is this point in time that holds this sacred importance to me and only me. My personal new year and a season of reflection and retrospection.
Most years the weeks leading up to my birthday have been accompanied by an inner storm that would shift my mood from happy and hopeful to sad and uninspired from one day to another. With age, I got used to that: it too shall pass. But this year has been calmer, softer. No turmoil and disappointment, no powerful yearnings that would sweep me off my feet and into another country to change the scenery for my birthday. Maybe that’s because it’s barely a month since I arrived in Montenegro: familiar as it is after all these years, it’s still some newness in my life.
So yes, I’ve been reflecting on the past year – even years. For the first time, I did a 2-year retrospection, visualising the timeline of my life and putting all the key events on it: travel, meeting someone who impacted me, milestones, dreams coming true, and turning points. Seeing the journey I’ve been on these past years helped me to calm down that demanding inner voice that says I’m going slow or that I’m not doing enough. (Ugh, I know. This old, unhelpful story.)
It warms my heart to see how life experience and inner work shift the way I hold myself in the world and adjust the lens through which I see this life. In my ~absolutely objective~ opinion, the changes are for the better.
One of my recent potent realisations peaked close to my birthday. You know how sometimes you sort of understand an idea or a concept, you even agree with it and still don’t apply it to your life…just because? Until one day, it hits you. From a mental notion it becomes an understanding that lives in every crevice of your being, something you now perceive on a cellular level. Full body knowing as I call it. This realisation was one of those cases.
High expectations
I have had, for as long as I can remember, incessantly, brutally high expectations about my actions and their results and about the way I show up and live. And I knew that it wasn’t healthy or helpful but I never really did anything about it, didn’t try to approach life differently. At least not long enough for it to have a lasting effect.
Somehow in the past months I heard the right words that landed, had the conversations that struck the right cords, and came across the books and articles that hit home. I can’t even pinpoint exactly how and when it happened but one day all that amalgamated with my reflections and – boom – I became utterly aware of the damage that my own high expectations caused me. Even more notably, I felt I’d had enough of that.
Most prominently my high expectations manifested as an unrealistic but stubborn desire to fit a huge amount of things into a day or a week and to be equally “productive” rain or shine, sick or healthy, experienced or immature. I wanted it all.
I was almost today years old when I realised that the background dissatisfaction I often feel is due to the fact that my expectations of what and how much I should be able to do are just not humanly possible. Just because I want it doesn’t mean it will happen. Meaning I can’t stretch my resources to infinity to be able to follow all my 500 interests AND get truly good at them all, quickly. I also can’t will myself to skip essential steps of a process and arrive at the desired destination in the blink of an eye.
I like to think that is what we call maturity: knowing that wanting is good and it helps us to define which direction to head towards but also knowing that we are still the ones to walk there. Things take time and our time here is finite. Choices must be made and any choice, as we learn in economics, has an opportunity cost.
My wish
Standing at the threshold of a new personal cycle, my wish for myself is to learn how to be a Pragmatic Dreamer. The person who is unafraid to dream big and who knows the power of small steps. Who has ambitions and knows her own limits. Who makes choices and lets go of that which falls away because of it. Most importantly, may I focus on how I want my life to feel in every moment of the journey, not measured by productiveness, accomplishments, and ticking things off the list.
If you feel like you could use some of the things I wished myself above – I wish them to you, too.
With love,
Your novice Pragmatic Dreamer
P.S. My birthday is on Tuesday the 9th of April 😊 If you feel like congratulating me, supporting this publication is a great way to do so:
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It's like reading my own story and struggles! And I'm an April born too.... 😄