Dreams Do Come True

December 29, 2008 | Cafe | Comments 1

lydia_dance As boomers, we’re all old enough to have had some dreams. But how many come true? How hard do most of us work to ensure that they’ll come true? Lydia Raurell is a believer now — in dreams, and in herself. Here is an excerpt from her new book “A Year of Dancing Dangerously.” The excerpt is called, “Believe me — dreams do come true.”

On the morning I saw a little dance studio ad in my local paper, I was fifty-four years old. I had been married, a single mother, and married again. I had moved into nine different houses and worked, nonstop, since I was eighteen years old. The death of loved ones, partings from friends and communities, grief, fear, and illness had woven deep lines in my face. I had earned my wrinkles. Change had been forced on me and had become my way of life, but what never changed through it all was my desire to dance.

I knew somewhere in the depths of my heart that I had wanted to dance for a long time, but I had so many commitments to so many people, so many details to look after, that for more than twenty years I kept telling myself time wasn’t right.

There is a magnet on the door of my refrigerator that says Don’t postpone joy. I guess the morning I stumbled across the Caruso Dancesport Center ad, I finally decided to stop ignoring my magnet. This is the story about how deciding not to postpone my joy changed my life.

lydia-miami-dance-172 I’m sharing my experience in hopes that it might help other women like me who are seeking to rediscover themselves. There are many of us who are eventually forced to confront the question of who we are, and who we want to be come. We have made the choice to be caretakers, to provide for our families, whom we cherish, to work at our careers as best we can. This in itself is a huge achievement, but there are dreams that weave their way through our daily lives, filaments of desire and magic, which we put aside in the immediacy of our many obligations.

To try and fulfill a dream can mean to risk everything – your health, your family, your friends, your finances, and ultimately your own imagining of who you are. You have to embrace the risk, you literally have to jump off an emotional cliff and go into free fall.

This, then, is the story of my year of discovering competitive ballroom dancing and what it meant to me. It is about setting a tremendous goal to be reaching in a year’s time. It is about pushing myself to go for it.

I don’t think I could have dared without the support of my husband. Without him it would have felt too lonely. But I have always felt that the hardest battles, those we fight at 4 in the morning, are solitary, with no awards or applause. These are the battles that go on within our psyche, of the self divided between wishing and doing. Will you dare to compete against yourself?

I knew there was no magic wand to make me an instant Dancer. The wand was hours and hours and hours of just plain hard work.

There were moments, even weeks of genuine terror and despair for me. When my mind or my body refused to function at all, much less at the standard I had set, it was truly discouraging. When I had practiced and practiced until I was tired to the bone, and still had not met my expectations, it was agonizing. But I had taken a do-or-die dictum. I was going to give every breath in my body and every shred of will power to make this dream come true. If I failed, or even died in the process, so be it. I would not capitulate.

I was going to dance.

My image of myself as an ill person had to be overcome. I had had years of pain management. I knew the rules were in order for me to live a normal life. They were a strict regimen of diet, rest, exercise, and minimum stress. The fact that I also had a torn meniscus in both knees, only 50% use of my right arm from a fracture that never healed properly, and damaged nerve roots in my lower back were obstacles. These were fears I had to get over to achieve my dream of being a serious ballroom competitor. It took all of my courage and more. It took every ounce of willpower and discipline that I could muster. It was worth it – the music made it worth it, the dancing made it worth everything. It became my life. A healthy life!

Lydia Raurell’s Web site.