Dreaming beyond what is currently possible

Summer is my favorite season, even in NYC where it can (and increasingly so it seems) be blazingly and uncomfortably hot and humid.

Ok, I don’t love that part.

But the spirit of summer holds so much appeal to me.

The park and the beach have always been my favorite places of joy, refuge, healing, rest and connection… and those places are best enjoyed in the summer.

And my experience of summer has definitely been reinforced and influenced by my experiences of summer as a parent with school age kids. I see how much my kids grow and thrive from the change of pace outside of the structure of the school year, and I don’t know if it’s their ages or the distance we are putting between the early lockdown days of the pandemic and now, or if it was because it was the last summer before my oldest child started high school, or if it was because this was the summer my younger child started riding the subway by himself, but this felt particularly true this summer.

Summer for me is a time for self-reflection, curiosity and integration.

It’s also a time for dreaming.

It’s not of course that these things can’t or shouldn’t happen at any other time of the year - they absolutely should.

But for me, summer is a reminder of how important those things are to maintain and sustain throughout the year.

And the pause in the “school year” provides a bit more spaciousness for the opportunity look beyond our current horizons and dream beyond what is currently possible.

I heard Malaika talk about this recently actually, as I listened to the playback of one of her coaching sessions (we record all our coaching sessions so we can coach as a team by listening to and staying informed about each other’s sessions, learning from each other, as well as coordinating on patterns, themes, learning points, individual, team and organizational needs etc.)

Malaika is really good at creating space in coaching sessions for dreaming and imagination. In our work we focus very much on self-identified needs so often in coaching we’ll ask, what is it you need?

It turns out that people of all kinds of identities, backgrounds and positions within organizational hierarchies get very befuddled by this question.

“Well what is an example of a need?” we have been asked, many times.

We are not socialized to think about what we need - and why would we, because then heaven forbid we might actually start advocating for our needs and asking for things from our systems and our leaders.

Within capitalism, we are required to want things, sure, as long as that means we are further participating in the system of trade for profit.

Needs are different though. I think of needs as the things we require in order to yes, survive, but also thrive, outside of how capitalism defines success as the accumulation of property and wealth.

We also have a tendency, once we’ve reoriented ourselves to thinking about our needs, to think about those needs within the context of what seems “possible” or “realistic” within our current reality.

It’s hard to articulate a need that we know cannot be met right now.

It’s not just hard - it can be painful to make explicit the ways in which our needs are not being met, especially if we just don’t see any pathway to those needs being met.

It makes sense to focus our energies on what is realistic… and yet this is also how we make ourselves and our needs small. It’s how we internalize our own oppression.

As Malaika said to her coachee: “Whenever I ask you what it is you need, you respond with what it is that you think can happen or think is possible. And I understand that, but I really want to know, what it is that you need? We can talk about what’s possible after, but I don’t want your articulation or your understanding of the things that you need to be filtered through the lens of what’s possible right now.”

“Obviously, we can’t ignore what’s possible right now. But it’s important to me that those who have been impacted in the way you have, and actually more important than that, it’s important for me that Black people have the opportunity to imagine. If whatever you could imagine were possible, what would you need?”

“And then after you get all of those things out, then you can go back and edit for what’s possible, and make strategies to get from what’s possible from where you are and what you need to what’s possible.”

This is not a new concept to me, I’ve heard Malaika say this before in sessions, and we often do imagining exercises in group workshops too, but somehow hearing it in this particular context right at the beginning of August, our month set aside specifically for reflecting and processing and strategizing and dreaming… it hit me a little differently.

It’s been a good year but it’s also been a tough year, as every year since the pandemic first hit has been as what had previously seemed possible or even taken for granted got pulled out from underneath us, and I needed to hear it.

Dream beyond what is possible.

Because it’s by dreaming beyond what is possible that what is possible expands.

Because really it’s about what we can see as possible.

Seeing it does not in and of itself make it happen, but it gives us the opportunity to follow up with actions and strategies and behaviors that make it a reality.

The dream may be unrealistic now, but what if the dream shows you a path that you would never otherwise have seen and some next steps in that direction that are realistic?

Hope is not a strategy (this is something Malaika has been reiterating a lot lately too!) but hope can LEAD to a strategy.

What are you dreaming of that is beyond what is currently possible?

*Photo from my favorite dreaming spot on my actual vacation*

Banner photo by Erik-Jan Leusink on Unsplash

Dreaming beyond what is currently possible

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