Waking Up From a Dream

You remember the last episode of the second Bob Newhart series? Probably it was one of the most ingenious bits of writing in comedy television history. After spending years as the owner of an Inn in New England, with an oddball cast of characters that included Daryl and the other Daryl, the tag was Bob waking up, calling to someone next to him in bed, and finding out that it was the wife from his first series! In fact, the second series had only been a dream!

I have noticed now nearly two months into my involuntary separation from my job (along with several others) so that they could go "in a different direction", that when I wake up in the morning, it almost seems precisely like Bob's experience--that the entirety of 25 years in which I lived and breathed legal ethics prosecutions, never happened. That it too was a dream! I seem to remember coming during a crises of the organization and living through multiple crises rising in the "ranks" from a trial deputy to a manager of several units, transferred into and out of them constantly. I seem to remember obsessive preparations and concerns and distress over any number of issues in which I was intimately involved, some to which I even provided solutions and balance. I seem to remember thinking it was all very important and that I was contributing to some overall good, even when there were frustrations. But then, it is all gone.

Something happened during all those years, career wise. I know it must have, as I am no longer the 30 something year old that began there but a woman nearly qualifying for senior citizen discounts. I certainly earned a living as I seem to have some monetary showing from it. I have friends from that locale, which clearly I could not have made but for having been there. And yet, it feels ephemeral at best.

This experience of a long part of my past is both liberating, and frightening in a way. I am starting over, but that from which I am starting over, is vaguely unreal and I while I suppose I can be grateful for experience and skills, I wonder what was the point if it could so easily dissipate. 

Did I leave my identity in that dream, or has it come with me? Or have I awakened a different person in some way? Is that difference a good one? Was the real me there in that dream state? Or now, embarking in a kind of several pronged approach toward that which seems enormously vague as first becoming a lawyer did not.

Some days I am ebullient. Others I am slightly anxious and annoyed to have been awakened. Mostly though there is this odd ease, and ease has never characterized me in any endeavor, as if I am sort of floating down a river. Every so often I stop at a lovely place and look around, and then move on to see what else is out there. I like it as long as I don't fall into some trap of "shoulds" and "oughts" about what is next.  I can do that to myself and others, well intentioned, sometimes contribute.  "You SHOULD open your own practice".  "You SHOULD consider outsourcing the areas of your expertise". 

I grew up on an endless stream of "shoulds".  I am not resentful of it, not even slightly as it turns out, but the only "should" for me henceforward is that (if I am listening) which comes from the lips of God--and I always fear He might ask more of me than that of which I am capable.  While I try to hear the Small Still Voice I intend otherwise to live in the the moments of each day, without getting caught up in the future, or encumbered by whatever that 25 years was, reality or dream. It's over, whatever it was. There is only now.