This past week, while my son’s quesadilla was frying in the pan, he ran into the living room to get the episode all set up. When everyone was settled and ready, he clicked play. We saw acts which ranged from touching to beyond ridiculous, but at the end, there was one performer who touched me above any I had ever seen before, and he made a comment I will never forget; “When you’re surviving, you can’t dream.”
Michael Ketterer is a pediatric mental health nurse who has a big heart for children who need a home. After he and his wife were told they should not have any more children due to health risks, they had settled on the fact that their daughter would be the only child they would ever have. But that perspective changed, when at the age of seven the little girl began to have dreams of three little boys who needed a home. In time they would adopt three boys whose home lives were surrounded by an environment that was unhealthy, unstructured, and unsafe.
When you are a child living in a home that is involved in meth and other drugs, you are always on alert and in a state of fear; indeed, there is no room for dreaming or goals, the energy to think about such things is just not there. So Michael took these children into his home and created an environment that would give them the freedom to dream and see the many possibilities that lay before them, and what is more important–that they had every right to those dreams.
After hearing this story I began to reflect on the chaotic past few months of my own life, which has been riddled by a barrage of unexpected family heartaches and financial strains that would try the endurance of a saint. Sometime in April, just barely two weeks into these stresses, I felt all of my creative processes slip away. My son and daughter experienced the same thing in their careers. I stopped writing on my book, composing music, working on my Facebook pages and websites–my mind seemed void of any imagination whatsoever. I began stress eating, sending my autoimmune issues into overdrive, which made me feel even less like creating because I felt ill most of the time.
It seems an obvious outcome that if one allows stress take them over they are going to stop functioning in many ways, but something about how Michael Ketterer said what he did about not being able to dream when you are in survival mode caused me to see things in a different light, and he said it so simply. It was like someone shook me awake from a haze, saying, “he’s talking about you too! He’s talking about anyone whose environment is in chaos.” So how did that change how I saw the situation I am in? It completely changed the canvas, painting it in a myriad of different colors. I no longer saw blackness taking me over, shutting out the light inch by inch, day by day. Instead, I realized I had the power to take
Today I started a new schedule. I began to rethink how I let things affect me. Instead of not writing at all when things are overwhelming, I promised myself to write something at least four days a week, if not more. The other days I will be keeping up on my Facebook pages and websites. I will also work on music at least once a week, as well as photography and any other creative processes that I was born with, for they are the colors that will shape my canvas. When the stresses become overwhelming I will redirect how I handle them. Instead of stress