La La Dreams

Dreamer.  I admit to being one. How about you?

My day “off” is Tuesday.  This past Tuesday my wife, Jill, and I went on a date to a $5 Tuesdays movie. You get a $2 hot dog and free popcorn.  As I entered the movie theatre building I suddenly found myself amid all these older looking people. Standing in line for our free popcorn I whispered to Jill, only half in jest, “We don’t look that old, do we?”  We laughed pretty hard.

Which was all prelude to seeing La La Land, the new musical romantic drama/comedy/tragedy (you can pick the category after you see it). The plot is familiar (boy gets girl, boy loses girl, etc.). There is a twist to the familiar plot, but I don’t want to spoil it for you. The singing and dancing, while not traditional, work as the music enhances and expands the storyline.  The film is beautiful, and I mean to use that precise word.  I loved everything about this movie, especially the acting of the lead, Ms. Emma Stone.  She does an Oscar-worthy job of allowing her face to reveal her heart.

But what most interested me, and what caused my ride home to be quite melancholy, is the film’s treatment of dreams: dreams realized, dreams deferred, and dreams denied. We all live each of those phases of life’s dreams.  There is a dinner scene in which the two leads have a conversation which, if I was alone, would have caused me to sob out loud.  I wept quietly through it because it reminded me of my dreams of decades ago, some realized, some deferred, some denied. It was a good cry, though, honestly earned by the actors and the script’s author.

But, here is what I am thinking as I struggle with the movie’s ending. I am nearing 63 years of age. I don’t want to be done dreaming. I do not believe God is done giving me dreams, and I want them, even though some will be some deferred, some denied. I want to still have La La Dreams. I hope that, at this age in which I have a deeper appreciation for the fact that the final credits will one day roll, and with the wisdom which comes from having failed and succeeded before, I will be able to know which dreams to strive to make a reality, and which to let die.

You still dream dreams, right? If you want to live the dreams that sing the best tunes, then you need to let die the dissonant dreams, the ones that get in the way of the most important dreams. 

May God give you the grace to dream dreams and the wisdom to live into the dreams which have your favorite melody.  La La!