Where Do Broken Dreams Go in a Pandemic?

2020 has not been a good year for humanity. And I think it’s safe to say that every musician, composer, publisher, conductor, every novice to professional musician is in a very real state of crisis, mourning or both. We have no idea when we will be able to safely gather to create the music that will not only entertain the world, but also soothe, inspire, and give courage and hope. Many of us feel like we are literally dying from this isolation.

It is extremely important that we grieve our losses. Our losses are deeply significant. The world as we know it has been changed, perhaps forever. What was routine and normal, what we looked forward to, and what we disliked are most likely gone.

We are at Ground Zero. We survey the damage and it’s too overwhelming to take in. We can’t even collect in groups to hug and reassure each other. It’s obscene. But there is something in human nature that allows us to not just survive, but thrive. It’s acceptance. Acceptance that this new, despicable, horrible normal is here to stay. And we will not let it destroy us. We will not let it keep us from figuring out how to fill the world with the music that we not only merely love, but music that we need. Music we ache for.

Our dreams are broken but not destroyed.

I’ve had a lot of big dreams. Not all of them have become a reality. Some dreams seem fine to just fade, while others feel like a death of sorts for having not come true. Those are the broken dreams. The ones that matter that haven’t become a reality.

The trouble with broken dreams is that they don’t go away even after we discard them and give up. They sit in our gut like an infection—an unfulfilled lump of failure. If they’d just die and go away we could move on. But they don't because we still believe in them. Did you get that? We still believe in them. They matter to us. We still have the passion but are at a standstill. We still have that love to create and make them come true, but for whatever reason, we can’t. So what do you do about broken dreams?

I finally gave up on one of my biggest broken dreams a few years ago and after I did, I woke up one morning and had a clear idea of how to proceed. I realized, finally, by walking away from the dream because of so much resistance, that a reset button was pushed that cleared everything and allowed a new thought process to develop. Resistance disappeared. (Resistance is usually always a result of our perceptions and thinking.) What I learned was that broken dreams usually just need a little space, a break, a change, and then creativity can thrive again. I learned that it’s extremely rare that a dream is so broken that it can’t be realized in some way.

I learned to embrace the Zen Proverb that teaches “the obstacle is the path.” The question is do you see and feel the difference between resistance and obstacles? Resistance is counterproductive. Obstacles are a gift. This seems counterintuitive at first, but what path have you encountered that doesn’t have obstacles? Overcoming obstacles (and failures) are the gifts that teach us how to claim our power to continue forward.

Trying to restore the reality we once knew is resistance. Steven Pressfield, in his groundbreaking book “The War of Art,” wrote “Resistance is self-sabotage. Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance.” When you encounter so much resistance that you can’t seem to move forward, let go and take a break. I can’t stress this enough. If your timeline is being threatened with seemingly no way forward, then your timeline is your resistance. Let it go.

There is another important key to realizing dreams. Being unattached to the outcome of your dream will help you accept and embrace all kinds of new possibilities and help you see and create new pathways, avoiding resistance. That means hold steady to the vision of your dreams. In other words, what do you see and feel when you envision your dream coming true? Hang on to that! See it, taste it, smell it, feel it, touch it! Don’t let it go! However, the important part here is not to predestine how your dream will come true, simply because you won’t be able to foresee the obstacles in your path, which are a natural part of the process. Keep the vision and embraces all those feelings, but don’t attach an outcome. The outcome is too often out of our control because we can’t foresee all the possible ways it might materialize. The outcome will materialize the way it needs to, and you will experience all those feelings you envisioned.

Our dreams may be broken, but they are not destroyed. They are probably just begging for you to take a break to stop resistance, be still, allow creativity to return when we are ready, and embrace the obstacles we face.

And despite a pandemic, social distancing, and so many obstacles, we live in an age where technology allows us to dream together.

The Fatal Flaw of Positive Thinking and How to Fix It

The power of positive thinking can revolutionize your life for the better, but there is a fatal flaw in thinking that it means eliminating everything that’s negative in our lives. Do you know why? Because eliminating everything that’s negative is impossible. We don’t live in a world where it’s all one way or the other. It’s a mix of both and it always will be. Like the contrast between light and dark, or joy and sorrow, we have contrast that allows us to comprehend both. Even positive and negative protons and electrons coexist and work together in a beneficial way. By having contrast, we have unlimited options to choose and create what we want. Without contrast, our options are profoundly limited.

In today’s world, there is a popular idea to “cut off toxic people” for the sake of “being positive.” This option is valid to a degree because there are probably people in our lives that don’t have our best interests in mind, and we probably shouldn’t associate with them. But is it possible that some people are trying to tell us the truth? They may appear to be difficult or negative, but what if they are trying to help us rather than keep us from what we really want? In other words, looking past their negative tone may hold a positive way forward. To find the value in what they say will require us to let go of our anger, disappointment, and hurt. If there is value in what they say it becomes a positive experience.

The pursuit of a positive life can be sabotaged by instant gratification. In fact, it seems many believe that instant gratification isn’t instant enough. For example, it’s easy to compare our lives to celebrities’ and wonder why their lives seem to be picture-perfect, and ours seem to suck. Aside from the fact that they are only showing you the pretty parts of their lives to impress you, they probably have some pretty sucky days and months that they don’t reveal. (Perhaps in part because they value a certain level of privacy.) Many of us admire and want to be like our favorite celebrities. It’s easy to get caught up in whatever the latest trend of “success” might be, hoping to emulate them to achieve a similar life. And those who write and speak about success, including celebrities, usually use the same keywords over and over. Words like “dedication,” “determination,” “set goals,” and “don’t allow negativity”. We get inspired long enough to decide to grit our teeth and push our way to what we want. We believe we must cut off “toxic” people, or we fall for instant money-making schemes, or a shady lure to gain millions of followers overnight, or try an unhealthy binge diet, or overdose on workouts at the gym our first month until we are sick and tired and want to quit. Just reading that last sentence is filled with tension. Constant tension is not a positive thing, it’s destructive. No wonder it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that positive thinking doesn’t work—because thinking positively all the time and having only positive results are impossible.

If you were to make a graph of your progress through life, it certainly wouldn’t be linear with a steady, straight line, angled upward. It would be as complex as looking at a graph of the stock market from the past several decades. You’d see small blips up and down, some enormous dives and some huge vertical leaps. But overall you’d see at each ascending point a line moving upward.

You are designed to be well. Even healing from illness is not completely linear. There are setbacks, good days, and bad ones, but we usually progress to wellness again. That’s because our natural state is wellness. It means that our bodies always work to be well, despite setbacks. (Isn’t that an amazingly positive thought about illness?) When I realized this in the middle of some huge depression and health issues, I decided to wake up each morning and thank my body for working so hard to make me well. That waking gratitude every morning changed my life for the better. My gratitude list began to grow longer and longer, and my depression began to fade and my health improved. I still wake every morning with gratitude.

There is a beautiful way to look at negative things: any negative experience that you don’t want might actually be a gift that helps point you toward something that you do want. If you can find something valuable about a negative experience, you win. You discover that no matter how bad, no matter how negative the experience is, there may be a lesson of value in it that could give you knowledge and power to ultimately achieve or become what you want. This is one of the secrets to living a life without regrets.

To summarize, there are two critical parts to make positive thinking effective: 

1) Avoid the flawed assumption that positive thinking means to eliminate everything negative. Trying to do so is impossible in a world where positive and negative experiences always exist. 


2) Positive thinking—and this is your superpower—is the result of allowing and accepting both positive and negative experiences, which help you learn and adapt, giving you the power to create a happy, positive life.

Inspiration, Play, and Failure Bring Success

To me, the most critical elements of success are inspiration, play, and failure. Not drive, not ambition, not an insane list of unachievable goals. Just inspiration, play, and failure. We are not efficient machines. We are humans. We have good days and bad days, productive ones, and unproductive ones. Pushing too hard, making unachievable goals, and constant drive without built-in rest will kill success quicker than anything else I know. And when you hit burnout, it’s relaxation and play that will make things right again, giving inspiration a chance to return. When we “work” we refer to the adult drudgery of duty and obligation, usually for money. But it’s play that will help us discover, experiment, learn, and progress.

Think about it: when a child experiments and learns, it’s called play. And it’s play that leads to discovery, inspiration, and those remarkable “aha” moments that lead to success. When children play, they learn about the world they live in. They learn about everything around them. They learn about relationships that not only include people, but they also learn about form, balance, design, space and proportion, light, dark and color and so much more. They are experiencing, and therefore, there is no failure, and they create and achieve at their level. They are wildly creative, uninhibited and the world is a canvas on which to paint their experiences.

As adults, we have been lead to believe that play is reserved for children. Adults rarely even refer to “play” except in association with children’s behavior. Play, then, by inference, is childish. Work has replaced play for adults. Therefore, if work is not “success,” it’s “failure.” Note how these two words are directly associated with “work” but not “play.” I think this is a perfect example of a very bad perception which society has created and embraced.

I taught piano lessons for over two decades. I taught many ages, including several adults. The students who had the most difficult time finding any joy at the piano were teenagers and adults who were driven to succeed, and could not tolerate making any kind of mistake (which they believed was failure). I remember one particular student who often arrived with furrowed brow, who tormented the piano. However, she would play perfectly many times, despite her harsh style. But even then her performance was mechanical and somewhat lifeless. She played ferociously no matter what the mood of the piece was. She finally admitted her fear of failing to please me which made her so tense that her muscles would only allow her to play as if she were attacking the keyboard. Finally, it dawned on me what to say to her:

“Thank you for working the piano. But we call it playing the piano for a reason. Please don’t work the piano. Please play it.”

I asked her to close her eyes and see herself playing this beautiful piece she chose, removing me from that picture altogether. After a minute or two, she opened her eyes and began playing. She was utterly amazed at the transformation of music she created. It came alive to her! The missing puzzle piece in her music was the rediscovery of play. The piano sang with emotion and feeling. Even when her playing wasn’t perfect, none of the beauty of her performance was minimized. Fear of failure was eliminated.

Play restored her joy. Failure no longer existed for her because she was playing. The stress of performing disappeared.

Did you know it’s actually failure that we need most (despite that we think we need success the most)? We fear and despise failure. We think it makes us look bad. Think about that last sentence. We don’t want to look bad because it’s embarrassing and we don’t want to feel or appear to be incapable. But that idea is always rooted in our insecurities. It’s because 
of or insecurities that we believe that “failure” is negative. In truth, even if we do fail, every failure is a lesson, a furthering of our education, a course correction pointing us back to inspiration with a modified outlook and a slight change in direction. That slight change of direction is the revolution in your life that both frightens and exhilarates you. Embrace it.