Never Stop Dreaming

Last night I danced Bachata in Kyoto.

I want to let that sentence sit for a moment, because it is the kind of sentence that should not exist and yet does — the kind that could only belong to this life, this year, this particular constellation of decisions that led me, somehow, to a small café called Rumbita in one of Japan’s most ancient cities, moving to Latin music with a Frenchman who did speak English but the facts is that he actually didn’t need to. Moving in the rhythm of Spanish music was more than enough.

Most tourists in Kyoto visit temples. They walk the bamboo grove. They photograph the torii gates at Fushimi Inari at dawn. They do not, generally speaking, take beginner-intermediate Bachata lessons on a Saturday evening and then stay for the social dancing afterward.

I am not most tourists.

It started, as the best things often do, with a friend’s question.

We were sitting at a small table — Irene, another woman from the Traveling Village, and I — after our lessons had finished. The party was beginning around us, music shifting, the floor filling with people who clearly knew what they were doing. We had ordered non-alcoholic drinks and were settling into one of those conversations that starts about dancing and slowly becomes about everything.

Irene asked us: what do you dream about for the next five years?

I found the question both intriguing and, at first, surprisingly difficult. I am someone who lives very much in the present — this city, this week, this morning’s practice, this season. The future can feel like a place I visit reluctantly, not because I am afraid of it but because the present asks so much of me and gives so much back that I rarely feel the need to look elsewhere.

But I sat with the question. Turned it over. And when I finally arrived at an answer, it surprised me with its simplicity.

My dream for the next five years is to never stop dreaming.

That is it. That is the whole thing.

Not a destination, not an achievement, not a particular version of my life I am working toward. Just this: that I never lose the capacity to imagine something new and reach toward it with both hands, the way I have always done, even when the reaching is uncomfortable and the arriving uncertain.

Dreams are not decorative. They are not the things you pin on a vision board and occasionally glance at. For me, they are the architecture of how I meet the world — the structure underneath the curiosity, the reason I keep choosing the slightly uncomfortable thing over the safe and known one. Without them I would not be sitting in Rumbita in Kyoto on a Saturday evening. I would not be writing this. I would not be any of the versions of myself I have most loved becoming.

The question sent me back to a memory from last year.

We were in Croatia — late spring, the landscape impossibly green, the air warm and full of something that felt like beginning. With a group of worldschooling friends we had met in Bansko, we visited a beautiful ranch near Plitvice Lakes and booked a horseback riding tour. Our friends were experienced riders. The tour was two hours. The landscape, when we reached the open fields, was the kind that makes you understand why humans have always found meaning in nature — high grass glowing in the early summer light, hills rolling in every direction, a sky so wide it seemed to belong to a different, larger world than the one we normally inhabit.

And then we galloped.

I have ridden horses before but never like that — never at a speed that makes the wind something you have to push through rather than something that simply passes you by. I was terrified. Genuinely, completely, the kind of scared that lives in the chest and the legs simultaneously. And at the same time — filling the exact same space as the fear, somehow coexisting without displacing it — there were bubbles of joy rising in me so fast I could barely contain them. I was giggling. In full gallop. Scared out of my mind and more alive than I had felt in months.

I fell twice. Both times into the high grass, which received me without complaint and hid me so completely that it took a moment for anyone to find me. I got back on both times. Not because I am particularly brave but because the alternative — stopping, not finishing, letting the fear be the last word — was unthinkable.

That feeling. That exact combination of terror and joy and aliveness and the refusal to stop — that is what I mean when I say I want to never stop dreaming. It is not a feeling that arrives in comfortable moments. It is what comes when you do the thing anyway.

Last night a man from France asked me to dance.

His name I didn’t catch over the music. He spoke good English, which helped, though honestly the dancing needed very little translation. His Bachata was considerably better than mine - like way better (hello my next goal to achieve). He took my hand and we stepped into it — his lead clear and confident, my following imperfect and getting better, the music doing what Latin music always does to me, which is to make the body want to move before the mind has decided anything.

He turned me. Swirled me. Led me through combinations I half-knew and half-invented in real time. I made mistakes and he absorbed them gracefully, the way good dance partners do, and we kept going. And somewhere in the middle of it — in the turning, in the movement, in the music and the laughter and the complete impracticality of dancing Bachata in Kyoto with a French stranger while Japanese conversations floated around us — I felt it again.

That thing from the Croatian field.

Joy so simple and so complete it needed no explanation. The particular happiness of being in a body that is moving well, in a moment that could not have been planned, in a life that keeps offering these intersections of the unexpected and the beautiful if you are willing to show up for them.

This is it, I thought. This is as simple as it gets.

You put yourself out there. You do the thing that is slightly uncomfortable, slightly unfamiliar, slightly outside the perimeter of who you thought you were. And more often than not, on the other side of the slight discomfort, something is waiting that you could not have imagined from where you were standing before.

I should tell you: I am someone who is in bed by ten. Who rises at five for yoga and practice and the careful, disciplined tending of a body and a life I have worked hard to build. I am not, by nature, someone who stays out for social dancing in a city where I don’t speak the language, moving to music I am still learning.

And yet here I am. Going back tonight for the second time.

Because the alternative — not going, staying in the safety of what I already know, letting the perfectly reasonable excuses win — feels, right now, like a small betrayal of something I want to protect. The part of me that galloped in Croatia and giggled in the high grass and got back on the horse twice. The part that dreamed its way to this life in the first place.

We leave Kyoto in a week. I intend to dance as much of it as possible.

Irene’s question is still sitting with me. I keep returning to it, turning it over, finding new surfaces.

What do I dream about for the next five years?

I dream of keeping this capacity alive — this willingness to step into the uncomfortable thing and discover that it contains something extraordinary. I dream of my children watching me do it and understanding, without anyone explaining it to them, that a life worth living requires a certain amount of showing up for things you are not yet sure you can do. I dream of growing older in a way that adds to rather than subtracts from — more curious, more open, more willing to be a beginner on a dance floor in a language I don’t yet speak.

I dream, simply, of not stopping.

Not the galloping. Not the dancing. Not the reaching toward things that feel slightly too large and turning out, again and again, to be exactly the right size after all.

Never stop dreaming.

Not because the dreams always come true.

But because the dreaming itself — the reaching, the showing up, the getting back on after falling into the high grass — is the most alive I know how to be.