July 18, 2025
156. Navigating The Death of Your Dream
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In this heartfelt solo episode of Bridging Connections, host Bryan Reeves delves into the profound journey of navigating life transitions and personal growth. Reflecting on his own experiences, Bryan shares the challenges and revelations that come with the death of a dream, the practice of grief, and the art of surrender. Join Bryan as he explores the importance of embracing change with grace, finding gratitude in unexpected places, and the enduring power of love and loss. Tune in for an introspective conversation that invites you to reflect on your own life transitions and how you can meet them with more ease and gratitude.
💡 Topics Covered:
- The paradox of being relational yet introverted
- Grieving the dream of home ownership and fatherhood
- Moving back to Los Angeles after the “great pandemic migration”
- Letting go of material things and the stories they hold
- The practice of grief in a death-phobic, grief-illiterate culture
- The meaning behind Bryan’s tattoo: Command. Surrender. Breathe.
- The flowering of a crepe myrtle as a symbol of unexpected beauty in endings
- A reflection on leaving behind gifts that may benefit others
🧠 Memorable Quotes:
“It’s not the end of everything. It’s just the end of everything you know.”
“A dream can’t die if you don’t dare to dream in the first place.”
“Grief is the price we pay for love.”
“We are like plants. We need the right soil to thrive.”
“How might you meet the death of a dream with more grace, more ease, and perhaps even more gratitude?”
🌱 Closing Reflection:
Bryan invites listeners to consider the dreams they may be quietly grieving or actively resisting. Rather than clinging to what was or what might have been, he offers a profound question:
"What if the greatest act of courage isn't holding on—but letting go with love?"
📚 Books Mentioned in the Episode:
- Die Wise by Stephen Jenkinson
- The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller
- Iron John by Robert Bly
🙏 Connect with Bryan:
For more on Bryan’s coaching, writing, and future episodes, visit bryanreeves.com
🙏 Show Highlights:
[00:02:15] - Introduction to the episode and the theme of life transitions.
[00:05:30] - Brian shares his personal journey of moving across the country and the death of a dream.
[00:12:45] - The importance of acknowledging and grieving the loss of dreams.
[00:20:10] - Reflections on the practice of surrender and its role in personal growth.
[00:28:00] - The story of planting a tree and its symbolic meaning in life transitions.
[00:35:20] - Brian's insights on love, loss, and the enduring power of gratitude.
[00:42:00] - Closing thoughts and an invitation to reflect on personal life transitions.
WEBVTT
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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Bridging Connections, formerly known as men this way.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host Brian with the Y-Reaves, former U.S.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Air Force Captain turned author and professional coach to men, women, and couples.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Alongside me as co-host, my lifelong friend of over forty years, T.Eard.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Here we have the raw, real conversations we need to be having about the topics that matter most, relationships, purpose, health, spirituality, and more.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Please subscribe to stay connected.
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[SPEAKER_00]: All right, let's dive.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not the end of everything.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's just the end of everything you know.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Those words are a song lyric that I heard while I was driving halfway across the North American continent.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For the fifth time in three years, just this past week, seeking yet again the elusive promise of home.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Ha, it's not the end of everything.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's just the end of everything you know.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Bridging Connections podcast with Brian Reaves.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Brian Reaves.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This episode is going to be a little different today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's just me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My normal co-host, Tate Aaron is not with us today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I also don't have a guest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll be honest with you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I've done, you know, I can't remember what episode this is, but I've been podcasting for four years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of my episodes have a guest or my co-hosts Tate.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's really my preferred way of doing it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to be honest doing it by myself is my least favorite way of doing this podcast because here's the truth of it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I am a very relational person.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I come alive in conversation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I love responding to questions and asking questions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's so bizarre.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's so interesting.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm also very introverted though.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's a bit of a of a paradox with me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm very introverted, but I don't like I'm not very talkative.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You know, my wife and I, we joke a lot because our phone conversations are so awkward.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We've been together for ten years and our conversations on the phone are always so awkward because I'm not very talkative.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I realized that that contradicts what I just said about being so relational and coming alive in conversation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I wasn't a Walt Whitman who said, I contradict myself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, so be it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I contradict myself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I contain multitudes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: All that to say that recording myself, maybe let's say it this way, recording myself doing a solo episode.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It always feels very awkward to me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I've done it a bunch of times over the years, not my favorite way of doing this, but you see here's the thing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This past week and this era of my life, like I'm going through, I'm going through a major
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[SPEAKER_00]: transition in life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A major developmental stage shift.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And really, I'm going through the death of a dream.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why I want to talk about in this solo episode.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I want to talk about the death of a dream.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that experience.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm I'm I'm fifty one.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Boy, I've I've climbed a lot of mountains in my life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And
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[SPEAKER_00]: when we're young, we tend to have big dreams, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, if we're dreamers, if we have any kind of ambition or desire, we dream of having a certain kind of life, a certain kind of intimate partner, a certain kind of job or career path, et cetera, et cetera.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think what comes for all of us humans,
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[SPEAKER_00]: is inevitably the confrontation with the death of a dream or many dreams.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it might even be the death of a dream of the dream of a relationship that maybe you've been in for a long time and you realize maybe intimate relationship or even family relationship and you realize, wow, this is never gonna be the thing that I've dreamed of.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think that this is one of the great confrontations that all humans, if we're paying attention, we will come to face at some point in our lives.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I don't care who we are, how successful we are, how much money we make, what family we were born into, it's just the nature of being human.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And in my case, this past week, just to tell you a little bit of the story, this past week, as I said, I drove halfway across the country from Austin, Texas to Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's actually my fifth time, I think I said this, my fifth time in three years doing a cross-country drive.
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[SPEAKER_00]: looking for home the elusive promise of home my wife and I left Los Angeles in twenty twenty two amidst the great pandemic migration right when when so many people were shifting away from large metropolisies like ours towards smaller nature adjacent cities towns and rural areas in our case
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[SPEAKER_00]: We got on the cattle train headed for Texas.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Many of our friends, well, my friends really, and that's important.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They were my friends.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They were already setting up homestead there, boasting tales of claint to country living and wildly affordable housing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At least compared to LA.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now for two years, we gave Austin a spirited try.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, still even made a few best, do best friends as did I. But in the end, Austin wasn't for us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we're just, we're just not Texans.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'd actually been more into by an old Texan oilman, a coaching client of mine.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I was coaching at the time when we decided to move and I told him, hey man, we're moving to Texas.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I guess we'll both be Texans now.
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[SPEAKER_00]: To which he responded, I'll never forget, you know, the sound of his voice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was that, that old Texan draw, and he was both respectful and resolute when he said, no, you might be moving to Texas, but you ain't gonna be Texan.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Not for a long time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And he proved correct.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We are Texans and Texans just Texas just wasn't for us and there's there's a lot of reasons for that Which I don't I don't really want to go into.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's not the point of this podcast The point of this podcast is to acknowledge and to talk about the death of a dream I spent this last week shoving a four bedroom homes worth of furniture into a storage container
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[SPEAKER_00]: I had to give away a lot of things that didn't fit inside that's sixteen foot by eight foot container.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You know what I spent is the first house I'd ever owned and boy was I eager.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I've if it actually felt I'd never really had the ambition to own a home before but I felt so much actually excitement and pride like here I am like a king with with finally my own castle to care for and tend to and and man that I tricked it out like I got all the
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[SPEAKER_00]: the lighting situation all around the house figured out all the technology dialed in from the from the garage door controllers to the automated sprinkler to you know all of the camera systems and all of that I've been built to spent almost twenty grand on a on a backyard stone patio building this beautiful stone
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[SPEAKER_00]: and rock fire pit patio with with plants planted throughout the backyard and a little herb garden plantters.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, it was my pride and joy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then life there was curveballs as life does.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we realized this this just isn't our home and we need to leave.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so you know this this this final drive back to Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: was really the final act in the death of my dream.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Inside of that, it's like, boy, there's just so much more in the dying of a dream.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It just seems like endless.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I had to give away a lot of my things, including one of my prized writing desks.
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[SPEAKER_00]: that I had bought it in LA, but it came from Indonesia and I really love that desk.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But I'll tell you, and this is one of the first lessons of this experience is, you know, I've lived a lot of places and I've moved so much that I've never really accumulated a lot of things that are meaningful to me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A few things here and there like my writing desk, some paintings and photographs, pictures,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, maybe some little trinkets here and there, Mementos, but not really any big pieces of furniture that I love or about tell you when I had to give away in the last five years, let me tell you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I have bought five mattresses.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My wife and I are two people, and I've bought five freaking mattresses.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because of all the places we've lived, because I also wanted to have beds for guests when they come over.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I gave away all three mattresses that I had.
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[SPEAKER_00]: in Austin and because they wouldn't fit in the container.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But I'll tell you, you know, I was about ninety minutes away from all of those floods that were happening in Texas this last week.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The tragic, tragic flooding that so far has claimed over a hundred people's lives and that seems the death count is just going to continue to go up.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And it was really helpful and clarifying, you know, helping me grow, be, feel gratitude to just have these things to be able to give them away even.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And a lot of the people that I gave them away to, they had stories themselves.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One woman her mother had been hit by a car.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And the king mattress that I gave her for free.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And this is a really good mattress and good shape.
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[SPEAKER_00]: this mattress was going to help her heal and help her convalesce in comfort and I felt good about that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Another man also was decorating an apartment for his mom.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There was a young man who had just moved to Austin and was getting his life started and he took my writing desk and also another mattress and again it just felt really good actually in the letting go of these things too.
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[SPEAKER_00]: to know that even though there was a very precious part of me that wanted to live the dream of being able to have all these things to have a home where my wife and I would raise a family and where our friends and family would come to visit us and stay with us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And even though I was really having a let go of that dream,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Um, that in my my letting go and and believe me, you know, I want to say letting go with grace, but I assure you there was a lot of kicking and screaming a lot of hell.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No, I won't go.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, in my body out of my mouth over the year, so that we
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[SPEAKER_00]: that we made the decision to leave Texas.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote, I mean, I did everything to not go.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote my congressman.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I lit candles at churches.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I prayed to saints.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I did some shamanic rituals.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Stop short of voodoo, ain't trying to hurt nobody.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, I did not.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I did not want to leave and I certainly didn't want to come back to LA.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But at the end of the day, I just had to accept that my wife was not, she was not doing well in Texas.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'll come back to that in just a moment, but I want to
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[SPEAKER_00]: just share that there I was able to really feel just gratitude and grateful that I had things that I could give other people to help make their lives a little bit easier even as my dream was was dying and its death row is really it's kind of packing up the house and giving away things I wouldn't fit in the container and oh boy let me tell you
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[SPEAKER_00]: I came, I came moments away.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There was a moment where I was defeated by the whole experience on moving day.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I just was defeated.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I had hired some movers to come in and help and they got me ninety-five percent of the way of loading up the container and they're like, all right buddy, we gotta go.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, left me with some things shown about they had another job that they had to go to and I guess they had overstayed their time with me as it was.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I was just defeated.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I just felt defeated just by the whole thing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I was ready to give up and I had this table that was given to me by my mentor, John Lee.
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[SPEAKER_00]: that was bought as a gift for him by Robert Bly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if you know, Robert Bly is like the Godfather of Men's work in the West.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote the book, Iron John, an incredible, incredible man.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And he was very good friends with my mentor, John Lee, who also was an author, is an author.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And John gave me this table that Robert had given him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a particularly attractive table.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's just a little fold down wooden table with two little wings on either side that fold up.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But I had dreamed of having men's gatherings around that table.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And in my moment of defeat, I was ready to give that away also.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I just was, I was defeated.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I was just no other word for it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I felt defeated.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then I talked to my wife and she, thank God, talked to me out of it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so I found a way to get it in the storage container.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm so glad, thank God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So glad that I took it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But
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[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we left Austin because I just had to accept that, you know, my wife is, she was, it was not the right soil for her.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Like humans were like plants, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: We need to be potted in the right soil to thrive.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Look, some of us may be hardier than others and more resilient and be able to thrive in a more of a variety of places and conditions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Um, my wife was made for Austin soil.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It just, it just isn't her land.
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[SPEAKER_00]: To be honest, it isn't mine either.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I, I probably could have stayed and, and, and, and eaked out of a good life there and not eaked out, but I could have made the most of it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I lived a lot of places.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Um, but it wasn't right for my wife, and it didn't even prove bad soil for our dog, who she developed aggressive skin allergies and Texas that she's still battling.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But nonetheless, despite my resistance, I just had to accept that Sylvie's vision for our lives, especially after all the loss that we had been through.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we did this with our therapist a couple of months, maybe six months a year ago, but we had been through eighteen.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We counted eighteen significant losses.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That just one or two of those alone would be enough to devastate a person and rock the foundations of a couple.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Eighteen.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So after all that we'd been through, but I just had to accept that Sylvie's vision for our lives was just clearer, stronger, and even dare I say better than mine.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because the truth is, I didn't have a clear vision for us anymore.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In a way, I'd run out of dreams.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But I give myself grace for that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because after all, it's difficult if not impossible to dream when you are deeply grieving.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So, there it was.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This drive back to LA.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Gosh, I don't know.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It feels like a crossing of a threshold.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that has been so vital importance for me over these few years has been the practice of grief.
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[SPEAKER_00]: of learning how to grieve the author Stephen Jenkinson who wrote a book called Die Wise.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He said very correctly I think that we are a death phobic and a grief illiterate culture.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Death phobic and grief illiterate
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'll tell you at the start of all this.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I had no idea how to grieve.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Everything in my body told me grieving is not safe.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not safe to be sad.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not safe to cry.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Just just, you know, put on a good, get some good thoughts in your head and carry on.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You know, keep calm and carry on.
18:11.677 --> 18:14.938
[SPEAKER_00]: That just was not going to work for me on this journey.
18:16.879 --> 18:21.001
[SPEAKER_00]: I've had to really learn over this path these past five years.
18:22.601 --> 18:34.405
[SPEAKER_00]: How to be with be with the heavy feelings, be with the sadness, be with the loss, be with the frustration, the heartbreak,
18:37.294 --> 18:37.694
[SPEAKER_00]: of life.
18:38.396 --> 18:47.371
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll tell you, I'm not one for regrets, but well, I don't look, there's only one regret that I have in this whole experience.
18:48.461 --> 18:57.825
[SPEAKER_00]: was it twenty twenty two, so three years ago, through the twenty twenty one, we made a big decision to to leave Los Angeles as I've shared.
18:58.766 --> 19:03.968
[SPEAKER_00]: We gave up a one or a lovely house in Los Angeles overlooking the valley.
19:04.188 --> 19:06.209
[SPEAKER_00]: It was spacious, beautiful.
19:06.229 --> 19:12.232
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like an old, it almost felt like a cabin in the middle of the city, but it was it was lovely.
19:13.573 --> 19:19.176
[SPEAKER_00]: had this green door that was like an Irish, had this kind of Irish cottage vibe.
19:19.196 --> 19:23.999
[SPEAKER_00]: I had a big Viking stove in the kitchen.
19:24.039 --> 19:25.380
[SPEAKER_00]: Had two fireplaces.
19:25.941 --> 19:26.661
[SPEAKER_00]: I loved it.
19:26.901 --> 19:29.323
[SPEAKER_00]: Giant oak tree in the backyard.
19:30.523 --> 19:31.504
[SPEAKER_00]: I just absolutely loved it.
19:32.765 --> 19:33.685
[SPEAKER_00]: And we gave that up.
19:34.906 --> 19:37.788
[SPEAKER_00]: And as hard as that was, I don't know.
19:38.088 --> 19:38.949
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't regret that.
19:39.490 --> 19:40.671
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that we had to leave.
19:41.571 --> 19:44.374
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that Sylvia and I, we had to go on this adventure.
19:44.995 --> 19:49.759
[SPEAKER_00]: But we made one major, major.
19:52.021 --> 19:55.805
[SPEAKER_00]: I won't use the word mistake because we just couldn't have known at the time.
19:56.786 --> 20:01.310
[SPEAKER_00]: But if there's one thing I would have done different, it was I wouldn't have bought our house in Austin.
20:02.351 --> 20:03.312
[SPEAKER_00]: That one choice.
20:04.490 --> 20:13.775
[SPEAKER_00]: where we bought at the height of the Austin market, like the hottest market, maybe on the planet, and we bought at the Tippy Tippy Top of that market.
20:14.656 --> 20:22.360
[SPEAKER_00]: If we were to sell that house now, we would probably lose about four hundred grand, four hundred thousand dollars.
20:24.848 --> 20:27.030
[SPEAKER_00]: And we can't sell the house now just to be clear.
20:27.070 --> 20:27.431
[SPEAKER_00]: We tried.
20:27.471 --> 20:28.472
[SPEAKER_00]: We tried for the past months.
20:28.712 --> 20:30.994
[SPEAKER_00]: We put it on the market and could sell it.
20:31.595 --> 20:32.936
[SPEAKER_00]: And so now we're renting it.
20:32.956 --> 20:40.323
[SPEAKER_00]: We're taking a big loss every month on the rent as a the gap between the rent and the mortgage.
20:41.364 --> 20:45.568
[SPEAKER_00]: But that one decision alone.
20:47.452 --> 20:52.856
[SPEAKER_00]: as it continues to have impact on our lives.
20:53.677 --> 20:55.218
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, that's just one of eighteen things.
20:55.238 --> 21:02.604
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the Los Angeles fires those through us for an entire loop because we didn't have a home in LA yet when the fires hit.
21:03.124 --> 21:05.906
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we had to actually go back to Texas for like four or five months.
21:05.967 --> 21:07.548
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, it's just been nonstop.
21:10.777 --> 21:20.259
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, there's just being with the feelings, the grief, the, you know, I've spent all of this time these last couple of years.
21:20.959 --> 21:31.041
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm half shared earlier, my wife and I also have been on a journey of of discovering we can't have a child together.
21:32.082 --> 21:38.703
[SPEAKER_00]: That too has just, I mean, been so much cause for grief and sadness and, um,
21:40.788 --> 21:45.335
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's just been a profound grief journey.
21:46.076 --> 21:57.091
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's one of the things that I've really had to put into practice that honestly, I think what I was getting at is the one thing that I might change.
21:58.183 --> 21:59.545
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, I regret buying that house.
21:59.565 --> 22:04.490
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to just call that right out because a part of me also knew we shouldn't we should I didn't want to buy that house.
22:04.550 --> 22:05.391
[SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't in love with it.
22:05.451 --> 22:08.855
[SPEAKER_00]: I was writing other peoples enthusiasm, but doesn't matter.
22:08.895 --> 22:09.315
[SPEAKER_00]: We did it.
22:09.616 --> 22:11.218
[SPEAKER_00]: And now, right, it's mine.
22:11.418 --> 22:14.081
[SPEAKER_00]: It's it's mine to hold and and my wife's as well.
22:14.301 --> 22:15.542
[SPEAKER_00]: The consequences of that.
22:16.604 --> 22:17.525
[SPEAKER_00]: That I wish we hadn't done.
22:17.545 --> 22:17.585
[SPEAKER_00]: Um,
22:18.986 --> 22:25.968
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's another piece to this that I wish five years ago, or no, I guess it's twenty twenty one when I was really suffering in LA.
22:26.028 --> 22:27.548
[SPEAKER_00]: The pandemic hit hit.
22:28.348 --> 22:33.889
[SPEAKER_00]: I really wish that I was better at just being with what was coming up for me.
22:33.909 --> 22:41.331
[SPEAKER_00]: That being with my feelings, being with the heaviness, being with I was already going through grief before we even left LA.
22:42.632 --> 23:05.710
[SPEAKER_00]: I I do wish that I had the presence of mind before we took such a drastic action to be with all that I was experiencing and not just not just think that that leaving rushing off would was the thing to do to a Swag I suppose my
23:07.770 --> 23:09.211
[SPEAKER_00]: My stuff, what I was going through.
23:10.692 --> 23:32.744
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's been one of the great lessons of this journey is learning, is really learning in my body, the importance of being with, being with the feelings, the loss, the grief, you know Francis Francis Weller who wrote a beautiful book titled The Wild Age of Sorrow reminds us in that book that everything we love we will lose.
23:33.404 --> 23:34.725
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely everything.
23:35.175 --> 23:37.736
[SPEAKER_00]: We love, we will lose.
23:39.077 --> 23:41.618
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's this other beautiful idea.
23:42.158 --> 23:47.120
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure who said it originally, but grief is the price we pay for love.
23:48.261 --> 23:50.022
[SPEAKER_00]: Grief is the price we pay for love.
23:52.207 --> 23:59.892
[SPEAKER_00]: So if we are going to have an open heart on this planet, just today, I was working with two women in two different coaching sessions.
24:02.193 --> 24:14.641
[SPEAKER_00]: One woman who's experiencing experience a lot of betrayal in her life and another woman who just, I mean, both of these women love so big, they love so big.
24:15.462 --> 24:16.582
[SPEAKER_00]: They have such big hearts.
24:17.624 --> 24:23.139
[SPEAKER_00]: And on the other side of loving big is massive heartbreak.
24:24.688 --> 24:30.492
[SPEAKER_00]: massive heartbreak, that is the price we pay for love is the heartbreak.
24:32.633 --> 24:51.925
[SPEAKER_00]: One of my friends, Brooke Weinstein, she did an Instagram post sharing how her, she just sent her, I think her sons, I think they're around ten years older, so maybe eight or eight and ten, and she was at the airport with them, putting them on an airplane to go off to, I think, some kind of summer camp, and she was balling her eyes out.
24:53.406 --> 24:56.787
[SPEAKER_00]: At this is the first time they were getting on an airplane to go somewhere without her.
24:57.147 --> 25:10.651
[SPEAKER_00]: And she's ballin' her eyes out and I wrote to her and said, look, this world is hard on moms because the very thing that you want to see happen, your son's growing up will also break your heart.
25:13.692 --> 25:17.633
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I think, you know, this is grief journey.
25:18.734 --> 25:19.754
[SPEAKER_00]: Learning how to grieve.
25:23.465 --> 25:30.770
[SPEAKER_00]: I think when we're younger, when we're younger, we just, we have so much hope and aspiration.
25:30.830 --> 25:32.791
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know how true that is for today's generation.
25:32.811 --> 25:39.716
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the world is just looking fucked in a way that it didn't, when I was, when I was growing up, there's still seem like a lot of possibility.
25:40.456 --> 25:42.078
[SPEAKER_00]: These days, there's so much of people.
25:42.138 --> 25:52.445
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that a lot of younger people may be more pessimistic, but there is still, in the youthful ideation of things, this idea that we can have the life we dream of.
25:53.485 --> 25:55.927
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think in many cases, we certainly can.
25:57.327 --> 25:59.469
[SPEAKER_00]: But life will inevitably break our hearts.
26:00.529 --> 26:05.432
[SPEAKER_00]: Life will inevitably turn out in ways that we didn't plan for.
26:05.572 --> 26:06.653
[SPEAKER_00]: Couldn't have seen come in.
26:06.693 --> 26:09.675
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll make choices believing one thing is true.
26:09.895 --> 26:18.360
[SPEAKER_00]: Only to discover that a whole other path is laid out that we couldn't possibly have known life would have us walk.
26:21.774 --> 26:22.795
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my, oh my arm.
26:23.215 --> 26:24.276
[SPEAKER_00]: I have this tattoo.
26:24.296 --> 26:25.858
[SPEAKER_00]: I got this tattoo in the last six months.
26:26.778 --> 26:29.381
[SPEAKER_00]: And there are, uh, it's a beautiful tattoo.
26:29.421 --> 26:33.805
[SPEAKER_00]: If you ever, if you ever, if we were cross paths, please stop me and please ask me about it.
26:33.845 --> 26:35.046
[SPEAKER_00]: I love talking about it.
26:35.546 --> 26:46.616
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's, there's a three words tattooed, uh, as part of it in, in an, in an ancient language, elder furhark and ancient, Icelandic, uh, Scandinavian language.
26:48.137 --> 26:52.561
[SPEAKER_00]: And the words are command surrender and breathe.
26:56.766 --> 27:03.152
[SPEAKER_00]: This journey has been a PhD plus level journey of surrender.
27:04.485 --> 27:07.486
[SPEAKER_00]: Not surrender in the cynical sense, right?
27:07.526 --> 27:17.349
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that, though, those few moments where I was defeated, and I was just like, fuck it, I'll give away even one of my most prized possessions, because I just, I just, this is just too big for me, I can't, I can't, I can't manage anymore.
27:18.309 --> 27:19.310
[SPEAKER_00]: Not that kind of surrender.
27:20.330 --> 27:28.032
[SPEAKER_00]: But I mean the kind of surrender that is a willingness for life to go in directions that you wouldn't have it go.
27:29.472 --> 27:37.694
[SPEAKER_00]: Surrender as a willingness to be in partnership with life, to not merely dictate how things should go.
27:38.014 --> 27:44.695
[SPEAKER_00]: The first word in that, and this is my spiritual practice, what I tattooed on my arm, command, surrender, breathe, and that word command.
27:45.256 --> 27:47.056
[SPEAKER_00]: It starts with commands, like, okay, be clear.
27:47.476 --> 27:53.201
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's be clear on what you want, be dare to dream, dare to dream and dare to speak out that dream.
27:53.221 --> 27:55.203
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, you dream.
27:55.263 --> 27:57.725
[SPEAKER_00]: A dream can't die if you don't dream in the first place.
27:58.966 --> 28:05.031
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, I know that it can be tempting to say, well, then why bother dreaming if it only may die?
28:05.071 --> 28:08.054
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's a, that's a, that's a cheap way out.
28:08.394 --> 28:12.037
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a, that's the cowards way out, in my opinion, in my experience.
28:12.758 --> 28:16.243
[SPEAKER_00]: like we're humans, we're dreamers.
28:16.884 --> 28:17.705
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's dream.
28:18.587 --> 28:19.708
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the command.
28:19.788 --> 28:21.190
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you want to see?
28:21.771 --> 28:25.036
[SPEAKER_00]: In my case, the dream that I was dreaming was
28:28.000 --> 28:48.370
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow, I dreamt of, of, of, of raising kids on a tree-lined street in a neighborhood where they could do safely walk themselves down to the local swimming pool and run around on summer nights collecting fireflies in jars.
28:49.311 --> 28:53.073
[SPEAKER_00]: Ride their bikes along wooded trails that sneak behind homes.
28:54.233 --> 29:01.576
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I wanted that life record open the front door at dinner time and holler off their names into the settling dusk to come home.
29:02.236 --> 29:06.037
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was my childhood, at least the better parts of it anyway.
29:06.057 --> 29:13.160
[SPEAKER_00]: And I wanted that for my wife and I and for the child that we we had hoped to have.
29:14.100 --> 29:14.260
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
29:14.300 --> 29:15.701
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted that was my dream.
29:16.261 --> 29:19.442
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the dream that took us away from from Los Angeles.
29:19.502 --> 29:22.563
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't I didn't believe that we could have that here.
29:24.772 --> 29:28.273
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was my command, right?
29:28.393 --> 29:31.435
[SPEAKER_00]: Life bring me that, bring me that experience.
29:32.675 --> 29:39.598
[SPEAKER_00]: And we did our best, we did our best to create that to bring that into existence.
29:40.218 --> 29:42.519
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is where the surrender part comes in.
29:43.479 --> 29:51.322
[SPEAKER_00]: Because there's only so much, say, over that, that I have.
29:52.405 --> 29:54.166
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, life has its say.
29:54.466 --> 30:01.469
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the big things life had to say is we don't get to have a child together.
30:02.489 --> 30:05.470
[SPEAKER_00]: Not one that's born of our own DNA.
30:06.811 --> 30:15.635
[SPEAKER_00]: And as devastating as that's been, it's brought us into another layer of questioning of inquiry, I should say, in surrender.
30:16.235 --> 30:20.777
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, okay, then, do you, does life want us to adopt?
30:21.997 --> 30:28.181
[SPEAKER_00]: Do we want to adopt right that's a we I don't know that we have full clarity on that yet.
30:28.221 --> 30:40.169
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a dance that we're doing I think as we still come out of the grief journey of infertility But this is this is the surrender practice right and also breathe
30:44.944 --> 30:54.012
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the breath, allowing the breath to be full and relaxed and still, allowing the body to be still.
30:54.092 --> 31:09.144
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the path of allowing, of partnering with life, of what surrender, not a cynical surrender.
31:09.185 --> 31:11.186
[SPEAKER_00]: In cynical surrender, we hold our breath.
31:13.462 --> 31:15.923
[SPEAKER_00]: We constrict our bodies.
31:16.584 --> 31:21.126
[SPEAKER_00]: We collapse into anger, resentment, frustration.
31:22.166 --> 31:26.068
[SPEAKER_00]: But in spiritual surrender, in full breath, surrender.
31:27.349 --> 31:30.890
[SPEAKER_00]: We're like Bruce Lee said, we're like water.
31:31.571 --> 31:35.733
[SPEAKER_00]: We flow with the movements of life as it would take us.
31:36.993 --> 31:39.635
[SPEAKER_00]: We dance with life as it shows up.
31:40.916 --> 31:48.843
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, this is the practice that I've been in that this experience has really called me to in these last many, many, as last few years.
31:50.765 --> 31:53.327
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a, I hope there may be a little sound in the background.
31:53.367 --> 31:56.310
[SPEAKER_00]: Hopefully that's not that there's some men doing some workout side.
31:56.330 --> 31:58.252
[SPEAKER_00]: Hopefully it's not distracting or you can't even hear it.
31:59.932 --> 32:05.374
[SPEAKER_00]: But I want to just finish by telling you a little story that happened in the final few days of us moving out.
32:05.554 --> 32:07.735
[SPEAKER_00]: You may have seen a video of this on Instagram.
32:08.815 --> 32:16.737
[SPEAKER_00]: I told you earlier that I had spent, I'd spent like twenty grand, really just creating a beautiful backyard.
32:17.738 --> 32:24.620
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the things I did is I had dreamt of having a crape, mortal tree with purple flowers.
32:25.881 --> 32:41.915
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we planted one and it was a fairly young tree so it wasn't it didn't flower the first year that we planted it and then then we moved we left and I was kind of heartbroken because well first off all the other plants that we planted they died in the the Texas heat
32:42.875 --> 32:53.863
[SPEAKER_00]: Within two months after we planted them, you know, five thousand dollars where the plans were dead because of the heat and because we left we left pretty quick after that and and I don't know that I watered them well enough.
32:55.545 --> 32:57.686
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't I was just I was in grief.
32:58.287 --> 32:59.488
[SPEAKER_00]: I was in grief and transition.
33:01.869 --> 33:08.074
[SPEAKER_00]: And anyway, as I said, we came back to LA or I'm sorry, came back to Texas because of the LA fires and
33:08.594 --> 33:10.276
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're trying to get the place ready to sell.
33:12.958 --> 33:15.280
[SPEAKER_00]: And still the tree never fruted.
33:15.300 --> 33:24.188
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was just convinced I will never get to see this purple, crepe, mortal tree flower.
33:25.149 --> 33:26.090
[SPEAKER_00]: But then check it out.
33:26.330 --> 33:27.351
[SPEAKER_00]: The very last
33:28.172 --> 33:29.372
[SPEAKER_00]: a few days I was there.
33:29.392 --> 33:35.894
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the last day I really noticed it when I was like within hours of getting ready to to leave to drive.
33:36.594 --> 33:40.395
[SPEAKER_00]: The container was packed and I was just doing my final clean up in the house.
33:41.556 --> 33:42.596
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, wouldn't you know it?
33:43.196 --> 33:45.957
[SPEAKER_00]: That Crap Emerald Tree was flowering.
33:46.537 --> 33:47.297
[SPEAKER_00]: Purple flowers.
33:47.997 --> 33:49.198
[SPEAKER_00]: I was ecstatic.
33:49.898 --> 33:53.199
[SPEAKER_00]: I felt so grateful and so relieved.
33:54.239 --> 33:56.900
[SPEAKER_00]: And even though, you know,
33:58.873 --> 34:04.161
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought that I planted that tree for Sylvia and I, and for the family that we would raise.
34:06.164 --> 34:08.127
[SPEAKER_00]: And life, life clearly had other plans.
34:09.149 --> 34:14.016
[SPEAKER_00]: And even as my dream, the death, my dream was dying.
34:14.637 --> 34:17.440
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, I was living through the death of that dream.
34:18.521 --> 34:20.242
[SPEAKER_00]: There was another family coming in.
34:20.262 --> 34:23.144
[SPEAKER_00]: They've actually just moved in in the last couple of days into the house.
34:23.204 --> 34:30.471
[SPEAKER_00]: There was another family, a young family that's also wanting to start a couple that just recently got married and is wanting to start a family.
34:32.232 --> 34:47.700
[SPEAKER_00]: They were coming into the house, and I reflected on the beauty that they were going to get to experience through that purple flowering, rape, and mortal tree that I planted for them a few years prior.
34:48.320 --> 34:50.141
[SPEAKER_00]: And I felt a lot of gratitude about that.
34:52.322 --> 35:00.426
[SPEAKER_00]: There's this old saying that's attributed to ancient Greece that went old men
35:00.873 --> 35:13.684
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's see, the saying goes like, when society becomes great, when old men plant trees under which they will never sit in the shade.
35:15.265 --> 35:16.166
[SPEAKER_00]: But others will.
35:16.566 --> 35:18.048
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm mangled that saying, but you get it.
35:18.148 --> 35:24.713
[SPEAKER_00]: When you plant trees for other people to send under the shade that you may never send under, that's when society becomes great.
35:25.694 --> 35:33.381
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought about that and I thought about the gift that I had left and even just being a good steward to that house and taking care of that house.
35:36.043 --> 35:37.605
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I felt gratitude in that.
35:38.466 --> 35:43.330
[SPEAKER_00]: I felt I felt grace in that and I felt surrender in that.
35:44.353 --> 35:54.059
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's the question that I want to leave you with, where might you be living through the death of a dream, or perhaps resisting the death of a dream?
35:54.100 --> 35:57.462
[SPEAKER_00]: And for a lot of people, it happens relationally.
35:57.942 --> 36:03.286
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe we're wanting a certain kind of relationship with our father or our mother.
36:04.106 --> 36:05.767
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's just never going to happen.
36:06.727 --> 36:23.195
[SPEAKER_00]: And that might be the death of a dream that we're either living through now as we're waking up to it, the reality of what is in that relational dynamic, or maybe we're still resisting it, still hoping that that dream will come true.
36:24.295 --> 36:34.879
[SPEAKER_00]: And the question I want to leave you with is simply how might you meet this death of your dream, with more grace, more ease.
36:34.899 --> 36:41.701
[SPEAKER_00]: Now saying it's easy, but more ease, and perhaps even more gratitude, right?
36:41.741 --> 36:52.985
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe even just acknowledging the gift of getting to love for a moment, of getting to love the thing you're either losing or realizing you may never have.
36:54.746 --> 36:59.808
[SPEAKER_00]: How might you meet it with more grace, more ease, and just a bit more gratitude?
37:00.929 --> 37:01.689
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening.
37:02.149 --> 37:02.849
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Brian Reeves.
37:03.410 --> 37:06.991
[SPEAKER_00]: This is Bridging Connections with me, Brian Reeves.
37:07.452 --> 37:08.092
[SPEAKER_00]: See you in the next one.
00:00.591 --> 00:03.872
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Bridging Connections, formerly known as men this way.
00:04.172 --> 00:07.172
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host Brian with the Y-Reaves, former U.S.
00:07.232 --> 00:11.253
[SPEAKER_00]: Air Force Captain turned author and professional coach to men, women, and couples.
00:11.933 --> 00:16.194
[SPEAKER_00]: Alongside me as co-host, my lifelong friend of over forty years, T.Eard.
00:16.734 --> 00:26.236
[SPEAKER_00]: Here we have the raw, real conversations we need to be having about the topics that matter most, relationships, purpose, health, spirituality, and more.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Please subscribe to stay connected.
00:28.697 --> 00:29.417
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, let's dive.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not the end of everything.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's just the end of everything you know.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Those words are a song lyric that I heard while I was driving halfway across the North American continent.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For the fifth time in three years, just this past week, seeking yet again the elusive promise of home.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Ha, it's not the end of everything.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's just the end of everything you know.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Bridging Connections podcast with Brian Reaves.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Brian Reaves.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This episode is going to be a little different today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's just me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My normal co-host, Tate Aaron is not with us today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I also don't have a guest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll be honest with you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I've done, you know, I can't remember what episode this is, but I've been podcasting for four years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of my episodes have a guest or my co-hosts Tate.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's really my preferred way of doing it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to be honest doing it by myself is my least favorite way of doing this podcast because here's the truth of it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I am a very relational person.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I come alive in conversation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I love responding to questions and asking questions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's so bizarre.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's so interesting.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm also very introverted though.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's a bit of a of a paradox with me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm very introverted, but I don't like I'm not very talkative.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You know, my wife and I, we joke a lot because our phone conversations are so awkward.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We've been together for ten years and our conversations on the phone are always so awkward because I'm not very talkative.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I realized that that contradicts what I just said about being so relational and coming alive in conversation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I wasn't a Walt Whitman who said, I contradict myself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, so be it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I contradict myself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I contain multitudes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: All that to say that recording myself, maybe let's say it this way, recording myself doing a solo episode.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It always feels very awkward to me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I've done it a bunch of times over the years, not my favorite way of doing this, but you see here's the thing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This past week and this era of my life, like I'm going through, I'm going through a major
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[SPEAKER_00]: transition in life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A major developmental stage shift.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And really, I'm going through the death of a dream.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why I want to talk about in this solo episode.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I want to talk about the death of a dream.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that experience.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm I'm I'm fifty one.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Boy, I've I've climbed a lot of mountains in my life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And
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[SPEAKER_00]: when we're young, we tend to have big dreams, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, if we're dreamers, if we have any kind of ambition or desire, we dream of having a certain kind of life, a certain kind of intimate partner, a certain kind of job or career path, et cetera, et cetera.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think what comes for all of us humans,
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[SPEAKER_00]: is inevitably the confrontation with the death of a dream or many dreams.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it might even be the death of a dream of the dream of a relationship that maybe you've been in for a long time and you realize maybe intimate relationship or even family relationship and you realize, wow, this is never gonna be the thing that I've dreamed of.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think that this is one of the great confrontations that all humans, if we're paying attention, we will come to face at some point in our lives.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I don't care who we are, how successful we are, how much money we make, what family we were born into, it's just the nature of being human.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And in my case, this past week, just to tell you a little bit of the story, this past week, as I said, I drove halfway across the country from Austin, Texas to Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's actually my fifth time, I think I said this, my fifth time in three years doing a cross-country drive.
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[SPEAKER_00]: looking for home the elusive promise of home my wife and I left Los Angeles in twenty twenty two amidst the great pandemic migration right when when so many people were shifting away from large metropolisies like ours towards smaller nature adjacent cities towns and rural areas in our case
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[SPEAKER_00]: We got on the cattle train headed for Texas.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Many of our friends, well, my friends really, and that's important.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They were my friends.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They were already setting up homestead there, boasting tales of claint to country living and wildly affordable housing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At least compared to LA.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now for two years, we gave Austin a spirited try.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, still even made a few best, do best friends as did I. But in the end, Austin wasn't for us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we're just, we're just not Texans.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'd actually been more into by an old Texan oilman, a coaching client of mine.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I was coaching at the time when we decided to move and I told him, hey man, we're moving to Texas.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I guess we'll both be Texans now.
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[SPEAKER_00]: To which he responded, I'll never forget, you know, the sound of his voice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was that, that old Texan draw, and he was both respectful and resolute when he said, no, you might be moving to Texas, but you ain't gonna be Texan.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Not for a long time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And he proved correct.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We are Texans and Texans just Texas just wasn't for us and there's there's a lot of reasons for that Which I don't I don't really want to go into.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's not the point of this podcast The point of this podcast is to acknowledge and to talk about the death of a dream I spent this last week shoving a four bedroom homes worth of furniture into a storage container
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[SPEAKER_00]: I had to give away a lot of things that didn't fit inside that's sixteen foot by eight foot container.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You know what I spent is the first house I'd ever owned and boy was I eager.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I've if it actually felt I'd never really had the ambition to own a home before but I felt so much actually excitement and pride like here I am like a king with with finally my own castle to care for and tend to and and man that I tricked it out like I got all the
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[SPEAKER_00]: the lighting situation all around the house figured out all the technology dialed in from the from the garage door controllers to the automated sprinkler to you know all of the camera systems and all of that I've been built to spent almost twenty grand on a on a backyard stone patio building this beautiful stone
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[SPEAKER_00]: and rock fire pit patio with with plants planted throughout the backyard and a little herb garden plantters.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, it was my pride and joy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then life there was curveballs as life does.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we realized this this just isn't our home and we need to leave.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so you know this this this final drive back to Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: was really the final act in the death of my dream.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Inside of that, it's like, boy, there's just so much more in the dying of a dream.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It just seems like endless.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I had to give away a lot of my things, including one of my prized writing desks.
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[SPEAKER_00]: that I had bought it in LA, but it came from Indonesia and I really love that desk.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But I'll tell you, and this is one of the first lessons of this experience is, you know, I've lived a lot of places and I've moved so much that I've never really accumulated a lot of things that are meaningful to me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A few things here and there like my writing desk, some paintings and photographs, pictures,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, maybe some little trinkets here and there, Mementos, but not really any big pieces of furniture that I love or about tell you when I had to give away in the last five years, let me tell you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I have bought five mattresses.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My wife and I are two people, and I've bought five freaking mattresses.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because of all the places we've lived, because I also wanted to have beds for guests when they come over.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I gave away all three mattresses that I had.
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[SPEAKER_00]: in Austin and because they wouldn't fit in the container.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But I'll tell you, you know, I was about ninety minutes away from all of those floods that were happening in Texas this last week.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The tragic, tragic flooding that so far has claimed over a hundred people's lives and that seems the death count is just going to continue to go up.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And it was really helpful and clarifying, you know, helping me grow, be, feel gratitude to just have these things to be able to give them away even.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And a lot of the people that I gave them away to, they had stories themselves.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One woman her mother had been hit by a car.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And the king mattress that I gave her for free.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And this is a really good mattress and good shape.
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[SPEAKER_00]: this mattress was going to help her heal and help her convalesce in comfort and I felt good about that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Another man also was decorating an apartment for his mom.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There was a young man who had just moved to Austin and was getting his life started and he took my writing desk and also another mattress and again it just felt really good actually in the letting go of these things too.
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[SPEAKER_00]: to know that even though there was a very precious part of me that wanted to live the dream of being able to have all these things to have a home where my wife and I would raise a family and where our friends and family would come to visit us and stay with us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And even though I was really having a let go of that dream,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Um, that in my my letting go and and believe me, you know, I want to say letting go with grace, but I assure you there was a lot of kicking and screaming a lot of hell.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No, I won't go.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, in my body out of my mouth over the year, so that we
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[SPEAKER_00]: that we made the decision to leave Texas.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote, I mean, I did everything to not go.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote my congressman.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I lit candles at churches.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I prayed to saints.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I did some shamanic rituals.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Stop short of voodoo, ain't trying to hurt nobody.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, I did not.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I did not want to leave and I certainly didn't want to come back to LA.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But at the end of the day, I just had to accept that my wife was not, she was not doing well in Texas.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'll come back to that in just a moment, but I want to
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[SPEAKER_00]: just share that there I was able to really feel just gratitude and grateful that I had things that I could give other people to help make their lives a little bit easier even as my dream was was dying and its death row is really it's kind of packing up the house and giving away things I wouldn't fit in the container and oh boy let me tell you
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[SPEAKER_00]: I came, I came moments away.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There was a moment where I was defeated by the whole experience on moving day.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I just was defeated.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I had hired some movers to come in and help and they got me ninety-five percent of the way of loading up the container and they're like, all right buddy, we gotta go.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, left me with some things shown about they had another job that they had to go to and I guess they had overstayed their time with me as it was.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I was just defeated.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I just felt defeated just by the whole thing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I was ready to give up and I had this table that was given to me by my mentor, John Lee.
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[SPEAKER_00]: that was bought as a gift for him by Robert Bly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if you know, Robert Bly is like the Godfather of Men's work in the West.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote the book, Iron John, an incredible, incredible man.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And he was very good friends with my mentor, John Lee, who also was an author, is an author.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And John gave me this table that Robert had given him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a particularly attractive table.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's just a little fold down wooden table with two little wings on either side that fold up.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But I had dreamed of having men's gatherings around that table.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And in my moment of defeat, I was ready to give that away also.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I just was, I was defeated.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I was just no other word for it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I felt defeated.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then I talked to my wife and she, thank God, talked to me out of it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so I found a way to get it in the storage container.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm so glad, thank God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So glad that I took it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But
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[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we left Austin because I just had to accept that, you know, my wife is, she was, it was not the right soil for her.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Like humans were like plants, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: We need to be potted in the right soil to thrive.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Look, some of us may be hardier than others and more resilient and be able to thrive in a more of a variety of places and conditions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Um, my wife was made for Austin soil.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It just, it just isn't her land.
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[SPEAKER_00]: To be honest, it isn't mine either.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I, I probably could have stayed and, and, and, and eaked out of a good life there and not eaked out, but I could have made the most of it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I lived a lot of places.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Um, but it wasn't right for my wife, and it didn't even prove bad soil for our dog, who she developed aggressive skin allergies and Texas that she's still battling.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But nonetheless, despite my resistance, I just had to accept that Sylvie's vision for our lives, especially after all the loss that we had been through.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we did this with our therapist a couple of months, maybe six months a year ago, but we had been through eighteen.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We counted eighteen significant losses.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That just one or two of those alone would be enough to devastate a person and rock the foundations of a couple.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Eighteen.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So after all that we'd been through, but I just had to accept that Sylvie's vision for our lives was just clearer, stronger, and even dare I say better than mine.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because the truth is, I didn't have a clear vision for us anymore.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In a way, I'd run out of dreams.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But I give myself grace for that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because after all, it's difficult if not impossible to dream when you are deeply grieving.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So, there it was.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This drive back to LA.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Gosh, I don't know.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It feels like a crossing of a threshold.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that has been so vital importance for me over these few years has been the practice of grief.
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[SPEAKER_00]: of learning how to grieve the author Stephen Jenkinson who wrote a book called Die Wise.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He said very correctly I think that we are a death phobic and a grief illiterate culture.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Death phobic and grief illiterate
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'll tell you at the start of all this.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I had no idea how to grieve.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Everything in my body told me grieving is not safe.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not safe to be sad.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not safe to cry.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Just just, you know, put on a good, get some good thoughts in your head and carry on.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You know, keep calm and carry on.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That just was not going to work for me on this journey.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I've had to really learn over this path these past five years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: How to be with be with the heavy feelings, be with the sadness, be with the loss, be with the frustration, the heartbreak,
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[SPEAKER_00]: of life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'll tell you, I'm not one for regrets, but well, I don't look, there's only one regret that I have in this whole experience.
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[SPEAKER_00]: was it twenty twenty two, so three years ago, through the twenty twenty one, we made a big decision to to leave Los Angeles as I've shared.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We gave up a one or a lovely house in Los Angeles overlooking the valley.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was spacious, beautiful.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was like an old, it almost felt like a cabin in the middle of the city, but it was it was lovely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: had this green door that was like an Irish, had this kind of Irish cottage vibe.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I had a big Viking stove in the kitchen.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Had two fireplaces.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I loved it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Giant oak tree in the backyard.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I just absolutely loved it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we gave that up.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And as hard as that was, I don't know.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I don't regret that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I know that we had to leave.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I know that Sylvia and I, we had to go on this adventure.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But we made one major, major.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I won't use the word mistake because we just couldn't have known at the time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But if there's one thing I would have done different, it was I wouldn't have bought our house in Austin.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That one choice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: where we bought at the height of the Austin market, like the hottest market, maybe on the planet, and we bought at the Tippy Tippy Top of that market.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If we were to sell that house now, we would probably lose about four hundred grand, four hundred thousand dollars.
20:24.848 --> 20:27.030
[SPEAKER_00]: And we can't sell the house now just to be clear.
20:27.070 --> 20:27.431
[SPEAKER_00]: We tried.
20:27.471 --> 20:28.472
[SPEAKER_00]: We tried for the past months.
20:28.712 --> 20:30.994
[SPEAKER_00]: We put it on the market and could sell it.
20:31.595 --> 20:32.936
[SPEAKER_00]: And so now we're renting it.
20:32.956 --> 20:40.323
[SPEAKER_00]: We're taking a big loss every month on the rent as a the gap between the rent and the mortgage.
20:41.364 --> 20:45.568
[SPEAKER_00]: But that one decision alone.
20:47.452 --> 20:52.856
[SPEAKER_00]: as it continues to have impact on our lives.
20:53.677 --> 20:55.218
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, that's just one of eighteen things.
20:55.238 --> 21:02.604
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the Los Angeles fires those through us for an entire loop because we didn't have a home in LA yet when the fires hit.
21:03.124 --> 21:05.906
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we had to actually go back to Texas for like four or five months.
21:05.967 --> 21:07.548
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, it's just been nonstop.
21:10.777 --> 21:20.259
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, there's just being with the feelings, the grief, the, you know, I've spent all of this time these last couple of years.
21:20.959 --> 21:31.041
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm half shared earlier, my wife and I also have been on a journey of of discovering we can't have a child together.
21:32.082 --> 21:38.703
[SPEAKER_00]: That too has just, I mean, been so much cause for grief and sadness and, um,
21:40.788 --> 21:45.335
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's just been a profound grief journey.
21:46.076 --> 21:57.091
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's one of the things that I've really had to put into practice that honestly, I think what I was getting at is the one thing that I might change.
21:58.183 --> 21:59.545
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, I regret buying that house.
21:59.565 --> 22:04.490
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to just call that right out because a part of me also knew we shouldn't we should I didn't want to buy that house.
22:04.550 --> 22:05.391
[SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't in love with it.
22:05.451 --> 22:08.855
[SPEAKER_00]: I was writing other peoples enthusiasm, but doesn't matter.
22:08.895 --> 22:09.315
[SPEAKER_00]: We did it.
22:09.616 --> 22:11.218
[SPEAKER_00]: And now, right, it's mine.
22:11.418 --> 22:14.081
[SPEAKER_00]: It's it's mine to hold and and my wife's as well.
22:14.301 --> 22:15.542
[SPEAKER_00]: The consequences of that.
22:16.604 --> 22:17.525
[SPEAKER_00]: That I wish we hadn't done.
22:17.545 --> 22:17.585
[SPEAKER_00]: Um,
22:18.986 --> 22:25.968
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's another piece to this that I wish five years ago, or no, I guess it's twenty twenty one when I was really suffering in LA.
22:26.028 --> 22:27.548
[SPEAKER_00]: The pandemic hit hit.
22:28.348 --> 22:33.889
[SPEAKER_00]: I really wish that I was better at just being with what was coming up for me.
22:33.909 --> 22:41.331
[SPEAKER_00]: That being with my feelings, being with the heaviness, being with I was already going through grief before we even left LA.
22:42.632 --> 23:05.710
[SPEAKER_00]: I I do wish that I had the presence of mind before we took such a drastic action to be with all that I was experiencing and not just not just think that that leaving rushing off would was the thing to do to a Swag I suppose my
23:07.770 --> 23:09.211
[SPEAKER_00]: My stuff, what I was going through.
23:10.692 --> 23:32.744
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's been one of the great lessons of this journey is learning, is really learning in my body, the importance of being with, being with the feelings, the loss, the grief, you know Francis Francis Weller who wrote a beautiful book titled The Wild Age of Sorrow reminds us in that book that everything we love we will lose.
23:33.404 --> 23:34.725
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely everything.
23:35.175 --> 23:37.736
[SPEAKER_00]: We love, we will lose.
23:39.077 --> 23:41.618
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's this other beautiful idea.
23:42.158 --> 23:47.120
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure who said it originally, but grief is the price we pay for love.
23:48.261 --> 23:50.022
[SPEAKER_00]: Grief is the price we pay for love.
23:52.207 --> 23:59.892
[SPEAKER_00]: So if we are going to have an open heart on this planet, just today, I was working with two women in two different coaching sessions.
24:02.193 --> 24:14.641
[SPEAKER_00]: One woman who's experiencing experience a lot of betrayal in her life and another woman who just, I mean, both of these women love so big, they love so big.
24:15.462 --> 24:16.582
[SPEAKER_00]: They have such big hearts.
24:17.624 --> 24:23.139
[SPEAKER_00]: And on the other side of loving big is massive heartbreak.
24:24.688 --> 24:30.492
[SPEAKER_00]: massive heartbreak, that is the price we pay for love is the heartbreak.
24:32.633 --> 24:51.925
[SPEAKER_00]: One of my friends, Brooke Weinstein, she did an Instagram post sharing how her, she just sent her, I think her sons, I think they're around ten years older, so maybe eight or eight and ten, and she was at the airport with them, putting them on an airplane to go off to, I think, some kind of summer camp, and she was balling her eyes out.
24:53.406 --> 24:56.787
[SPEAKER_00]: At this is the first time they were getting on an airplane to go somewhere without her.
24:57.147 --> 25:10.651
[SPEAKER_00]: And she's ballin' her eyes out and I wrote to her and said, look, this world is hard on moms because the very thing that you want to see happen, your son's growing up will also break your heart.
25:13.692 --> 25:17.633
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I think, you know, this is grief journey.
25:18.734 --> 25:19.754
[SPEAKER_00]: Learning how to grieve.
25:23.465 --> 25:30.770
[SPEAKER_00]: I think when we're younger, when we're younger, we just, we have so much hope and aspiration.
25:30.830 --> 25:32.791
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know how true that is for today's generation.
25:32.811 --> 25:39.716
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the world is just looking fucked in a way that it didn't, when I was, when I was growing up, there's still seem like a lot of possibility.
25:40.456 --> 25:42.078
[SPEAKER_00]: These days, there's so much of people.
25:42.138 --> 25:52.445
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that a lot of younger people may be more pessimistic, but there is still, in the youthful ideation of things, this idea that we can have the life we dream of.
25:53.485 --> 25:55.927
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think in many cases, we certainly can.
25:57.327 --> 25:59.469
[SPEAKER_00]: But life will inevitably break our hearts.
26:00.529 --> 26:05.432
[SPEAKER_00]: Life will inevitably turn out in ways that we didn't plan for.
26:05.572 --> 26:06.653
[SPEAKER_00]: Couldn't have seen come in.
26:06.693 --> 26:09.675
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll make choices believing one thing is true.
26:09.895 --> 26:18.360
[SPEAKER_00]: Only to discover that a whole other path is laid out that we couldn't possibly have known life would have us walk.
26:21.774 --> 26:22.795
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my, oh my arm.
26:23.215 --> 26:24.276
[SPEAKER_00]: I have this tattoo.
26:24.296 --> 26:25.858
[SPEAKER_00]: I got this tattoo in the last six months.
26:26.778 --> 26:29.381
[SPEAKER_00]: And there are, uh, it's a beautiful tattoo.
26:29.421 --> 26:33.805
[SPEAKER_00]: If you ever, if you ever, if we were cross paths, please stop me and please ask me about it.
26:33.845 --> 26:35.046
[SPEAKER_00]: I love talking about it.
26:35.546 --> 26:46.616
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's, there's a three words tattooed, uh, as part of it in, in an, in an ancient language, elder furhark and ancient, Icelandic, uh, Scandinavian language.
26:48.137 --> 26:52.561
[SPEAKER_00]: And the words are command surrender and breathe.
26:56.766 --> 27:03.152
[SPEAKER_00]: This journey has been a PhD plus level journey of surrender.
27:04.485 --> 27:07.486
[SPEAKER_00]: Not surrender in the cynical sense, right?
27:07.526 --> 27:17.349
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that, though, those few moments where I was defeated, and I was just like, fuck it, I'll give away even one of my most prized possessions, because I just, I just, this is just too big for me, I can't, I can't, I can't manage anymore.
27:18.309 --> 27:19.310
[SPEAKER_00]: Not that kind of surrender.
27:20.330 --> 27:28.032
[SPEAKER_00]: But I mean the kind of surrender that is a willingness for life to go in directions that you wouldn't have it go.
27:29.472 --> 27:37.694
[SPEAKER_00]: Surrender as a willingness to be in partnership with life, to not merely dictate how things should go.
27:38.014 --> 27:44.695
[SPEAKER_00]: The first word in that, and this is my spiritual practice, what I tattooed on my arm, command, surrender, breathe, and that word command.
27:45.256 --> 27:47.056
[SPEAKER_00]: It starts with commands, like, okay, be clear.
27:47.476 --> 27:53.201
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's be clear on what you want, be dare to dream, dare to dream and dare to speak out that dream.
27:53.221 --> 27:55.203
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, you dream.
27:55.263 --> 27:57.725
[SPEAKER_00]: A dream can't die if you don't dream in the first place.
27:58.966 --> 28:05.031
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, I know that it can be tempting to say, well, then why bother dreaming if it only may die?
28:05.071 --> 28:08.054
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's a, that's a, that's a cheap way out.
28:08.394 --> 28:12.037
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a, that's the cowards way out, in my opinion, in my experience.
28:12.758 --> 28:16.243
[SPEAKER_00]: like we're humans, we're dreamers.
28:16.884 --> 28:17.705
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's dream.
28:18.587 --> 28:19.708
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the command.
28:19.788 --> 28:21.190
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you want to see?
28:21.771 --> 28:25.036
[SPEAKER_00]: In my case, the dream that I was dreaming was
28:28.000 --> 28:48.370
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow, I dreamt of, of, of, of raising kids on a tree-lined street in a neighborhood where they could do safely walk themselves down to the local swimming pool and run around on summer nights collecting fireflies in jars.
28:49.311 --> 28:53.073
[SPEAKER_00]: Ride their bikes along wooded trails that sneak behind homes.
28:54.233 --> 29:01.576
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I wanted that life record open the front door at dinner time and holler off their names into the settling dusk to come home.
29:02.236 --> 29:06.037
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was my childhood, at least the better parts of it anyway.
29:06.057 --> 29:13.160
[SPEAKER_00]: And I wanted that for my wife and I and for the child that we we had hoped to have.
29:14.100 --> 29:14.260
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
29:14.300 --> 29:15.701
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted that was my dream.
29:16.261 --> 29:19.442
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the dream that took us away from from Los Angeles.
29:19.502 --> 29:22.563
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't I didn't believe that we could have that here.
29:24.772 --> 29:28.273
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was my command, right?
29:28.393 --> 29:31.435
[SPEAKER_00]: Life bring me that, bring me that experience.
29:32.675 --> 29:39.598
[SPEAKER_00]: And we did our best, we did our best to create that to bring that into existence.
29:40.218 --> 29:42.519
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is where the surrender part comes in.
29:43.479 --> 29:51.322
[SPEAKER_00]: Because there's only so much, say, over that, that I have.
29:52.405 --> 29:54.166
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, life has its say.
29:54.466 --> 30:01.469
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the big things life had to say is we don't get to have a child together.
30:02.489 --> 30:05.470
[SPEAKER_00]: Not one that's born of our own DNA.
30:06.811 --> 30:15.635
[SPEAKER_00]: And as devastating as that's been, it's brought us into another layer of questioning of inquiry, I should say, in surrender.
30:16.235 --> 30:20.777
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, okay, then, do you, does life want us to adopt?
30:21.997 --> 30:28.181
[SPEAKER_00]: Do we want to adopt right that's a we I don't know that we have full clarity on that yet.
30:28.221 --> 30:40.169
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a dance that we're doing I think as we still come out of the grief journey of infertility But this is this is the surrender practice right and also breathe
30:44.944 --> 30:54.012
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the breath, allowing the breath to be full and relaxed and still, allowing the body to be still.
30:54.092 --> 31:09.144
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the path of allowing, of partnering with life, of what surrender, not a cynical surrender.
31:09.185 --> 31:11.186
[SPEAKER_00]: In cynical surrender, we hold our breath.
31:13.462 --> 31:15.923
[SPEAKER_00]: We constrict our bodies.
31:16.584 --> 31:21.126
[SPEAKER_00]: We collapse into anger, resentment, frustration.
31:22.166 --> 31:26.068
[SPEAKER_00]: But in spiritual surrender, in full breath, surrender.
31:27.349 --> 31:30.890
[SPEAKER_00]: We're like Bruce Lee said, we're like water.
31:31.571 --> 31:35.733
[SPEAKER_00]: We flow with the movements of life as it would take us.
31:36.993 --> 31:39.635
[SPEAKER_00]: We dance with life as it shows up.
31:40.916 --> 31:48.843
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, this is the practice that I've been in that this experience has really called me to in these last many, many, as last few years.
31:50.765 --> 31:53.327
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a, I hope there may be a little sound in the background.
31:53.367 --> 31:56.310
[SPEAKER_00]: Hopefully that's not that there's some men doing some workout side.
31:56.330 --> 31:58.252
[SPEAKER_00]: Hopefully it's not distracting or you can't even hear it.
31:59.932 --> 32:05.374
[SPEAKER_00]: But I want to just finish by telling you a little story that happened in the final few days of us moving out.
32:05.554 --> 32:07.735
[SPEAKER_00]: You may have seen a video of this on Instagram.
32:08.815 --> 32:16.737
[SPEAKER_00]: I told you earlier that I had spent, I'd spent like twenty grand, really just creating a beautiful backyard.
32:17.738 --> 32:24.620
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the things I did is I had dreamt of having a crape, mortal tree with purple flowers.
32:25.881 --> 32:41.915
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we planted one and it was a fairly young tree so it wasn't it didn't flower the first year that we planted it and then then we moved we left and I was kind of heartbroken because well first off all the other plants that we planted they died in the the Texas heat
32:42.875 --> 32:53.863
[SPEAKER_00]: Within two months after we planted them, you know, five thousand dollars where the plans were dead because of the heat and because we left we left pretty quick after that and and I don't know that I watered them well enough.
32:55.545 --> 32:57.686
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't I was just I was in grief.
32:58.287 --> 32:59.488
[SPEAKER_00]: I was in grief and transition.
33:01.869 --> 33:08.074
[SPEAKER_00]: And anyway, as I said, we came back to LA or I'm sorry, came back to Texas because of the LA fires and
33:08.594 --> 33:10.276
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're trying to get the place ready to sell.
33:12.958 --> 33:15.280
[SPEAKER_00]: And still the tree never fruted.
33:15.300 --> 33:24.188
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was just convinced I will never get to see this purple, crepe, mortal tree flower.
33:25.149 --> 33:26.090
[SPEAKER_00]: But then check it out.
33:26.330 --> 33:27.351
[SPEAKER_00]: The very last
33:28.172 --> 33:29.372
[SPEAKER_00]: a few days I was there.
33:29.392 --> 33:35.894
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the last day I really noticed it when I was like within hours of getting ready to to leave to drive.
33:36.594 --> 33:40.395
[SPEAKER_00]: The container was packed and I was just doing my final clean up in the house.
33:41.556 --> 33:42.596
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, wouldn't you know it?
33:43.196 --> 33:45.957
[SPEAKER_00]: That Crap Emerald Tree was flowering.
33:46.537 --> 33:47.297
[SPEAKER_00]: Purple flowers.
33:47.997 --> 33:49.198
[SPEAKER_00]: I was ecstatic.
33:49.898 --> 33:53.199
[SPEAKER_00]: I felt so grateful and so relieved.
33:54.239 --> 33:56.900
[SPEAKER_00]: And even though, you know,
33:58.873 --> 34:04.161
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought that I planted that tree for Sylvia and I, and for the family that we would raise.
34:06.164 --> 34:08.127
[SPEAKER_00]: And life, life clearly had other plans.
34:09.149 --> 34:14.016
[SPEAKER_00]: And even as my dream, the death, my dream was dying.
34:14.637 --> 34:17.440
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, I was living through the death of that dream.
34:18.521 --> 34:20.242
[SPEAKER_00]: There was another family coming in.
34:20.262 --> 34:23.144
[SPEAKER_00]: They've actually just moved in in the last couple of days into the house.
34:23.204 --> 34:30.471
[SPEAKER_00]: There was another family, a young family that's also wanting to start a couple that just recently got married and is wanting to start a family.
34:32.232 --> 34:47.700
[SPEAKER_00]: They were coming into the house, and I reflected on the beauty that they were going to get to experience through that purple flowering, rape, and mortal tree that I planted for them a few years prior.
34:48.320 --> 34:50.141
[SPEAKER_00]: And I felt a lot of gratitude about that.
34:52.322 --> 35:00.426
[SPEAKER_00]: There's this old saying that's attributed to ancient Greece that went old men
35:00.873 --> 35:13.684
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's see, the saying goes like, when society becomes great, when old men plant trees under which they will never sit in the shade.
35:15.265 --> 35:16.166
[SPEAKER_00]: But others will.
35:16.566 --> 35:18.048
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm mangled that saying, but you get it.
35:18.148 --> 35:24.713
[SPEAKER_00]: When you plant trees for other people to send under the shade that you may never send under, that's when society becomes great.
35:25.694 --> 35:33.381
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought about that and I thought about the gift that I had left and even just being a good steward to that house and taking care of that house.
35:36.043 --> 35:37.605
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I felt gratitude in that.
35:38.466 --> 35:43.330
[SPEAKER_00]: I felt I felt grace in that and I felt surrender in that.
35:44.353 --> 35:54.059
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's the question that I want to leave you with, where might you be living through the death of a dream, or perhaps resisting the death of a dream?
35:54.100 --> 35:57.462
[SPEAKER_00]: And for a lot of people, it happens relationally.
35:57.942 --> 36:03.286
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe we're wanting a certain kind of relationship with our father or our mother.
36:04.106 --> 36:05.767
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's just never going to happen.
36:06.727 --> 36:23.195
[SPEAKER_00]: And that might be the death of a dream that we're either living through now as we're waking up to it, the reality of what is in that relational dynamic, or maybe we're still resisting it, still hoping that that dream will come true.
36:24.295 --> 36:34.879
[SPEAKER_00]: And the question I want to leave you with is simply how might you meet this death of your dream, with more grace, more ease.
36:34.899 --> 36:41.701
[SPEAKER_00]: Now saying it's easy, but more ease, and perhaps even more gratitude, right?
36:41.741 --> 36:52.985
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe even just acknowledging the gift of getting to love for a moment, of getting to love the thing you're either losing or realizing you may never have.
36:54.746 --> 36:59.808
[SPEAKER_00]: How might you meet it with more grace, more ease, and just a bit more gratitude?
37:00.929 --> 37:01.689
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening.
37:02.149 --> 37:02.849
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Brian Reeves.
37:03.410 --> 37:06.991
[SPEAKER_00]: This is Bridging Connections with me, Brian Reeves.
37:07.452 --> 37:08.092
[SPEAKER_00]: See you in the next one.
