Today’s post is by my friend Tim Shea.  His friendship and his words have helped me through many dark hours, and I’m honored to share his essay here.

As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.  (Prov. 23:7)

For thousands of years and in cultures around the world it has been universally understood that the inside, drives the outside.  That a person’s perception of who they are, what they are capable of, and their relative worth to the world will in large part determine the levels of success and happiness that they will know in their lives.  I have never met a successful man who was not also a confident man.  I have never met a resolved, determined woman, who did not eventually realize her goals.  Conversely, a person with low or poor self-esteem, has very little chance of realizing great success in this life.  The two states are mutually exclusive.  Countless books have been written on the subject of the causal relationship between self-perception and success, and with good reason.  Virtually no one would argue this point.  And yet many are the people who at one time knew success and happiness, and now find themselves in a state of confusion, at best, and despair at worst, wondering what happened, and wondering whether, or even if they can climb back out and return to their former, happier state.

Do you know who our friends are?  Do you know who the people are in our lives that we must cherish?  Who we must hang onto for dear life?  They are those people who can look into our eyes and remind us of who we once were.  Of whom we once, long ago, or perhaps, not so long ago, might have become had we stayed on the path that we were following back when they knew us.   Those who can make us recall that spark of divinity that lies within each of us, which in some way set us apart from everyone else once upon a time.  That spark that in some way made us special, even if it was only for a while, and even if it was only in some obscure and insignificant way.  Everyone at one time or another has had a brush with greatness.  Everyone at some time surprised themselves and came close to realizing their potential.  Came close to knowing how good or even great they could actually be.  Our friends remember it, and they help us remember it.

Life can be very hard on dreams.  Life can take people who at one time were full of hope, curiosity, determination, confidence and perseverance, and wear them down to the point where they find themselves living in that wasteland where dreams go to die and disappointment and regret flourish like weeds in an abandoned lot.  People can become worn down to the point where they actually have come to believe that the divinity they once manifested was no more than a fluke or a happy accident.  That in fact, the true spark of the divine wasn’t really ever there.   This almost never happens overnight.  That would be too easy to explain away.  Too easy to bounce back from.  No, the kinds of things that cause people to lose their way happen very slowly.  They are insidious.  They start lightly.  Faintly.  Almost imperceptibly.  Then, a bad break here, a bad decision there, inactivity at a time that there should be massive activity, and things begin to change.  With each passing wave of failure, however slight, a little piece of the shore of confidence is washed away.  From the undertow of doubt, the foundations of competency and success slip away into the seas of mediocrity and a once sturdy and secure beachhead slowly begins to crumble.  This can take years to happen.  In fact, it usually does.  And there is a proportional relationship between the amount of time it takes to happen, and the amount of time that it takes to return to our starting place, if, in fact, we can return at all.

However, some of us have been richly blessed.  Some of us have people in our lives who are not content to allow us to continue to live in that dark place that we have carved out for ourselves.  That place, that on the surface seems rather innocuous.  Rather unremarkable.  In fact, quite like the place that the majority of the world lives in.  The place that many of our parents called home.  That so many of our friends call home.  The place from which the cynics, the doubters, the jaded, the disappointed and the heartbroken, tell those of us who dare to hope for something better, that there is, in fact, nothing better.  That this is as good as it gets, and that we would do well to make our peace with it as soon as possible.   Our friends are those brave souls who venture into that place, and take us by the hand, and remind us of who we are.  They remind us of what we once were, and what we could be again.   They appeal to our true selves.   They call us back into the battle with exhortations of reliving past glory, of recommitting to a hope and a destiny reserved especially for us.  They beckon to the best that is in us, and they call it forth, believing that it is still there almost as though they can see it.  They look into our eyes and they remember who we once were.  They act as a lighthouse for us.  A beacon on which we can fix our gaze, and then follow into a safe and familiar harbor.

These people are our friends.  These people are the heroes of our lives.  These are the people to cherish.  They rarely give us something we didn’t  already have.  They just reach in and help us find what we misplaced.  They help us dust it off, and set it aright.  And you know what the best part is?  They actually want us to believe that we did it ourselves.  They won’t take credit for their part in breathing life back into our souls.  For restoring hope.  They won’t even share it.  But we, who have been on that journey, know better.  We who have been to that dark place, and are leaving it behind, know better.  Some of us are still making our way out.   Some of us are well on our way.  Wherever we are on the journey back, and in whatever way we were touched, we know.  We all know.  And we are forever grateful.

“Squid wrestling: all tentacles and no substance.” Sleep Talkin Man

As a dream worker, I find it fascinating to try to understand what dreams mean. Images that arise in sleep talk are little jewels of dreams, which can be explored in the same way as longer, more involved dreams. I discovered Sleep Talkin Man because all of a sudden, several people brought the blog to my attention…friends on Facebook, and other dream workers. When I saw the post quoted above, at first I just had a good laugh, which is a sure sign that there’s a nugget of truth in it. But then I began to wonder what that nugget of truth would be. After all, I have no plans to literally wrestle squid.

As I considered the symbol as a metaphor, the first thing that came to mind is that this is exactly what it’s like for me to wrestle with my grief. All tentacles and no substance. Since my last blog post, my mother-in-law decided she’d had enough of her multi-year fight against cancer, and died peacefully in her sleep. After losing my mother seven months earlier, the grief was familiar, yet different. I didn’t have the prolonged fog or sense of unreality, but I did find that I could sleep as long as I was allowed, including multi-hour naps during the day. At first, sadness mixed with relief that her suffering was over, but as the days wore on, the relief faded and the sadness took over.

Every little reminder, mostly unexpected, raises tears. Today, it was the bulky white envelope in the mailbox. Seen from the end, in the stack of other mail, it resembled the sort of envelope my mother-in-law would send, stuffed with photos and clippings and a cheerful note. Each of these reminders grips me in its tentacles and I have no choice but to live through the rise of emotion.

Yet there’s nothing of substance to grab onto. There’s no physical being to wrestle to the ground, no actual tentacle to peel off my skin. Instead, there’s just the acknowledgement that loving someone creates deep and lasting ties, and even when the other person is gone from this earth, the habits of those ties remain in our hearts and minds. People say that time will heal my grief, and they may be right. But I know, from watching my mom get teary when she spoke of her dad, decades after his death, that the tentacles never really let go.