Shiny Bits of Life

“Dreams” often mean “desires” or “hopes” – or if we are serious with our intentions, “plans.”

Today I’ll refer to “dreams” in terms of what happens when we’re asleep.

I love dreams – at least most of the time. It’s fascinating to see how our brains mash up random bits of our past experiences with what’s going on in our lives.

My wife, daughter and I often ask each other first thing in the morning, “Did you dream anything?” It’s a fun way to start the day.

Lately I’ve been having a lot of dreams related to my job – the projects I’m spending my days working on. Sometimes those dreams are just variations on what is really happening and other times they go in random weird directions. A few weeks back I dreamed that I needed to bake several egg dishes and write down the recipes. (I’ve never been much of a cook.)

My favorite dream of the last several months was one that featured my mom. She passed away more than five years ago. In this dream, she talked with me, and it was very soothing. The part of my brain that was still rooted in reality knew that she was gone, but she came back for just a little while. It was really nice.

Have you had any good dreams lately?

My dad used to say that. (He’s gone now, so I haven’t heard him say it for many years.)

“Love me, love my dog,” simply means we have to put up with things we may not appreciate about some of the people we know. This is such a fundamental idea that I too often forget.

We all expect perfection from others, at some level. The closer the person to us, the more we expect from them. (The opposite holds true too – we expect a lot from our governmental leaders, and we will probably never meet them.)

Annoying habits or choices can be huge roadblocks in any relationship. The sooner we get over being fixated on those things, the sooner we can enjoy that relationship.

And yes, that’s our little dog Sparky. She’s pretty easy to love, as she is very loving in return. But she loves to bark at squirrels and ghosts we can’t see. I hope you get to meet her someday.

We had a million dollars. We lived in an alternate universe for five years, where we had a million dollars compared to some of our neighbors.

Nairobi, Kenya, is a huge city in East Africa. The distance between the rich and the poor is huge. As a result, crime is more common than in most parts of North America and Europe. There are more razor wire fences, alarm systems, security guards and carjackings.

I know it’s nice to focus on the positive aspects of other cultures, but that’s not my mission today. Instead, I want to tell you what it’s like to be rich.

Generally, it’s not fun. Simply eating at a restaurant caused a lot of guilt. We knew the price of one not-even-fancy meal could have fed a hungry family for days. Was the brief pleasure of eating out worth it? We thought so, as dining out was one of our ways to survive.

And we gave. We invested in people who were naturally part of our lives. We quickly learned that just giving money was not the answer.

Providing training allowed a young man to have a better-paying job that made a difference that lasted a lifetime. But it was a lot of blood, sweat and tears to make that path actually work, on his part and ours.

Paying for dental work for a lady we knew allowed her to eat with no pain, for years afterward.

So how do you deal with the guilt in your life? I would encourage you to not sit on it or suppress it. Do something.

Epilogue: We have been back in the land of Target and Prada for more than seven years. We are not directly involved in the lives of those we helped back then. And the guilt of having so much relative wealth decreases as time washes our memories away. But we’re still trying to make a difference in situations that are in front of us now. We fail a lot – and still eat at restaurants. But we are doing something.