On Dreaming Up New Worlds

“Need to dream up a new world with you.”

My dear friend Tejal, a brilliant yoga and social justice leader, sent me this message last week and it was the perfect antidote to my wallowing in helplessness about the overwhelming problems in our world.

I felt weighed down by covid, the holidays, marking another 365 days gone by, and the gradual return to business as usual when business as usual never worked for people of color, the marginalized, the poor, the disabled, and the unconsidered. Then 2022 started with a slough of January 6th anniversary stories about the demise of US democracy.

Tejal’s words snapped me back to the moment at hand where we can only focus on what is within our power.  Sometimes an outside voice is needed to wake us up from whatever trance we’ve fallen into.

Ironically, my work is helping people paint their dreams so we can map out the steps needed to accomplish their (seemingly) daunting goals, but I needed someone else to remind my impatient brain to do the same.

Change doesn’t happen without the seeds of new dreams planted by everyday people like us, who imagine the world we want to exist in and then do the work to make it happen.

This is the only way the world evolves towards better.  This is the only way WE evolve towards better.

Some of us might want to save the world from whatever ill we think is most pressing and some of us may want to have a steady paycheck with predictable hours and insurance so we can spend as much time as possible on a passion project.

It doesn’t have to be grand by any measure but your own.  It can be anything, as long as you’re true to your most daring dreams and freed from your fear of not accomplishing it.

We get so easily caught in What if it doesn’t work out? that we forget to focus on What if it does?

And even when we’re clear on our dreams and living into our dream lives, it’s worth doing the exercise of dreaming up a new world if we haven’t done it in a while to push the limits of what we think is possible and to ensure we haven’t missed incorporating something that’s become newly meaningful to us.

I’ve walked my talk for a long time and have lived various versions of my dream life, but have also felt quite stagnant and depressed at times, which I accept as part of the flow of life.

2020 and 2021 were joyful and fulfilling despite the downs, BUT I so needed Tejal’s words because I haven’t tested my boundaries since 2020, when I co-founded Agency DEI after getting fed up with the lack of progress in advertising.  We’re now tracking year over year workforce diversity data to ensure transparency and accountability.  But over the last year, the overwhelming challenges of sustainable change wore down my hope that we could make a difference.

It is specifically at these junctures where the fight is won or lost.  Whether you give up or keep going.  And the battle is almost always waged inside our heads.

The overwhelming challenges of any sustainable change, whether it’s changing our diet or changing an industry, will force us to confront our desire to keep going.

These challenges can be suffocating, but it’s our job to fight for our breath of fresh air and keep going.  Otherwise, wtf are we doing here?

Dream up a new world is the necessary call to action to the tortuous question of how do we solve the biggest challenges of our lives.

And if this sounds too idealistic or unrealistic, dreams are by definition idealistic and by nature unrealistic.  But only in the present tense.  Idealism and unrealism coupled with strategy and action are how humans have evolved for eons.

Our world is at once so beautiful and so broken.  And it needs the dreamers and doers in all of us to dream up our new worlds and commit to making them real so we can all change our lives and the world for the better.  

Collectively, our individual drops in the ocean can tip the scales towards beautiful if we each take the baby steps towards our dream worlds, but only if there’s a dream to start with.

So, what does your dream world entail?  I'd love to hear your answers and will read them all.


🙏🙏,

Pam