I’ve heard people say “never give up on your dreams” but in my experience dreams change and some dreams we lose or they become obsolete.
Perhaps you swap one dream for another because one dream is more important to you than the other. In choosing the better dream, I think it’s important to allow yourself the space to grieve the loss of the old dream. Especially if it was something you worked for and fought for long and hard. Losing a dream is like losing a friend. Grieve.
My Lost Dream
For many years I’ve had a dream to transform my property into a retreat house with horses and a place for women to come and be spiritually nourished and taught practical concepts that enrich their lives.
I’ve had a visual of the house remodeled, the red barn, the white picket fence, the labyrinth, and the benches and flowers along the creek for reflection time. I even visualized the man who would come into my life and help make it all a reality by working alongside me on the project.
Perpetual Fly In the Ointment
The challenge all along has been a pot-hole ridden road that floods multiple times a year. In fact, the road and the field surrounding it becomes a lake. When this happens, you have a choice to evacuate immediately and find somewhere to stay for a minimum of 3 days or be prepared to be stranded on an island.
Due to something we think TVA is doing differently with the Chickamauga Dam, it’s actually flooded 5 times since Chris and I married in September of last year, usually with only a day’s worth of rain to cause it. This is unheard of, even for us.
This, of course, is not conducive to the idea of a retreat location. Who wants to plan a big retreat, have people make travel arrangements; and then it flood and guests can’t get in or out?
People have suggested building a bridge, building up the road, or buying a boat. These solutions are either expensive or impractical. Even the boat option isn’t an effective solution because the flood waters are always different. You’d need docks on either end, and you can’t guarantee whether the water will reach the dock or run past it.
Bottom line, I didn’t have the resources to fix any of this. But I held onto the vision and hoped one day it would resolve itself when my kids were grown and I was ready to create this retreat property with my dream husband.
Dream Husband Arrives On the Scene
So when my dream husband arrived — someone who could easily help me create my dream — I got excited. Of course, God would give me the rest of my dream – right? Nope. Dream man doesn’t want to live here. Who would? The road tears up our cars. Nobody even wants to drive up our road to visit us, much less attend a retreat here! In fact, I believe my poor faithful Nissan has had all it can take (as of yesterday).
My husband also doesn’t want to live in a house where I lived with my ex husband. Who am I to judge that? I wouldn’t want to live in the house he remodeled for his ex wife. How can I blame him? Honestly, I’m looking forward to building a new life in a new place that is just ours.
What he or I want now is really irrelevant because due to a tangled financial mess with my divorce, I don’t own this property anyway. I won’t go into details, but bottom line, this land can’t be mine any longer. Time to walk away.
Even though I’m looking forward to a new adventure, I did build an entire life in my mind around this place. I am allowing myself to grieve and say goodbye. Not only am I saying goodbye to a home I reared my six children in, but it’s also the end of having my sister’s family as neighbors. My kids and her kids are like siblings. They love each other and are extremely close.
Most of all, I say goodbye to a dream that was all tangled up in my plans for the future. In many ways for reasons too lengthy to enumerate, I feel as if I’m saying goodbye to me.
Yes, before anyone writes me to say it, it’s possible I might be able to pursue my idea somewhere else — if my husband is game for it. I think he’d only go for it if it was a beach property and he got to give our guests rides on his dream charter boat. Hmmm… I think he might just go for that.
As we create a new life together in a new place, I trust that new dreams will materialize … ones I can share with this man whom I love more than I love this land — more than I love the old dream.
In the end, I’m realizing I’m living the ultimate dream — which is to have a connected, loving relationship with a good man. That was the big WHY behind all of it. It was never really about the house, the property, the barn, or the retreat location. It was always about having a relationship with a mate I could work alongside to co-create a life with. That, I have. That is the door to endless possibilities. The dream continues…
Energy therapy is something I use to process loss and grief and deal with past traumas. For more information, click here.
About Marnie Pehrson Kuhns
Marnie Pehrson Kuhns is a Certified SimplyAlign Practitioner™ who uses music and creativity to mentor you past barriers, fears and doubts to discover, create, align with, and deliver your soul’s song (the mission, message or purpose you are on this earth to live). Marnie is a best-selling author with 31 fiction and nonfiction titles. If you'd like Marnie and her husband Dave to work with you personally on Your Great Reinvention, get a FREE 20-minute strategy session with Marnie here.
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