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.