Sundays from the Porch
Somewhere Over the Clouds
One of my favorite things about flying is that it puts me into a meditative state. Once I get on the plane, anyway. The airport is still the airport: security lines, delays, gate changes. The occasional sprint from one terminal to another. But something always shifts once the cabin door closes and the wheels leave the ground.
I typically raw dog my flights. No movie. No music. No podcast. Just a window seat, a few hours, and whatever decides to surface.
My mind moves through thought topics like a casino slot machine. Family, work, relationships. Work, childhood, travel. Travel, relationships, future. Childhood, relationships, family. Future, relationships, family. The combinations keep spinning until eventually something lands.
It was ‘dreams, dreams, dreams’ on a recent flight between Minneapolis and Philadelphia. Not any particular dream but the role dreams play in our lives. Jackpot.
I’ve always been fascinated by the things that call to us. The places we want to go. The people we hope to become. The visions we carry for how we’d like our lives to look and feel. Some dreams arrive loudly. Others whisper for years. Some feel practical and attainable. Others seem to come from somewhere beyond logic entirely.
What struck me during that flight wasn’t the dreams themselves. It was the way they follow us. The way they evolve. The way they quietly change shape as we do.
Dreams often arrive as destinations when we’re young: a career; a relationship; a city; a home; a title; a certain kind of life.
We imagine that one day we’ll arrive and discover that we’ve finally become the person we were trying to be. But the older I get, the more I wonder if dreams were ever meant to work that way.
I think my biggest dream was to survive.
That might sound heavier than I mean it to but it’s true.
For a long time, I mistook the things I wanted for the reasons I wanted them. I wanted acceptance. I wanted professional growth. I wanted stability. I wanted independence. But, looking back now, many of those dreams were proxies for something deeper. Acceptance was really belonging. Professional growth was really security. Stability was really safety. Freedom was really the belief that my life could become larger than the circumstances I found myself inside.
Nearly ten years ago, I sat on a bench overlooking the Surf City bay on Long Beach Island and had the distinct feeling that the water was rising. It wasn’t, of course. But life was.
Responsibilities seemed to be accumulating faster than I knew how to carry them. The future felt smaller than I wanted it to feel. I couldn’t see a roadmap forward. I couldn’t see an exit. I couldn’t even clearly articulate what I wanted. I just knew I wanted more room than I felt I had.
What I couldn’t see at the time was that freedom had already become the dream. Not travel. Not entrepreneurship. Not living abroad. Freedom. The others were simply manifestations of it.
Ten years ago, I desperately wanted this life. I wanted flexibility. I wanted autonomy. I wanted the ability to wake up and make choices that felt like my own. I wanted the freedom to follow curiosity.
Today, many of those things have become so ordinary that I rarely stop to acknowledge them. Working for myself. Spending summers abroad. Building a life that isn’t tied to a single zip code. These things used to live on vision boards and journal pages. Now they’re calendar entries.
That’s the strange thing about dreams: the ones that come true often stop looking like dreams. They become normal. Almost part of the furniture. Background scenery. And if we’re not careful, we can become so focused on the next dream that we forget to notice the fulfillment of the last one. But, somewhere above the clouds, another realization surfaced.
A twenty-year-old dream can quietly become a burden. Because we change—not because we fail. Sometimes we remain loyal to dreams that belonged to earlier versions of ourselves. We continue chasing outcomes long after we’ve outgrown the person who wanted them. We cling to destinations when the real gift was the direction they pointed us in.
I’ve come to believe that dreams aren’t contracts. They’re correspondence. They arrive to tell us something. And then they change as we do.
The dream that once taught us courage may later teach us surrender. The dream that taught us independence may eventually teach us connection. The dream that helped us escape may one day invite us to stay.
These days, the dream I’m revising has less to do with freedom than it does with presence. Less to do with getting somewhere than understanding how I want to show up once I arrive. How I serve. How I contribute. How I participate in the lives and communities around me. How I spend the finite hours that make up a life. The questions have changed.
Maybe that’s what growing up really is. Not abandoning our dreams. Not achieving them but staying in conversation with them and allowing them to evolve as we evolve. Allowing them to reveal the deeper truths hidden beneath them.
I’ve come to think of dreams as points in a constellation. For years, we focus on individual stars; the promotion; the relationship; the move; the business; the adventure. Only later do we step back far enough to see the pattern they were drawing all along.
What if the purpose of a dream isn’t to arrive there? What if its purpose is to move us toward the next version of ourselves?
Maybe that’s why the most important dreams never truly disappear. They simply keep pointing us forward, one star at a time.