Dreams Keep Us Alive

I am in Stockholm at the moment. To some people, being in Stockholm is not particularly remarkable. It is a city, like any other, with roads and airports and even a sea port which connect it with other cities, and people make their way from city to city, as people do.

To Europeans, any European city has a certain familiarity. Perhaps the primary language spoken on the street has a different lilt, and perhaps the brand of beer one particularly likes is unavailable in the average bar, and perhaps the cheese has a different texture. But cities in Europe, particularly in Western Europe, have been cross-fertilising for so long that there is a certain Europeanness about them all.

To those of us from other parts of the world, European cities are decidedly European, also, but not in the familiarity-breeds-contempt European way that they seem European to inhabitants of other European cities. My friends in Stockholm save their money to travel to Asia, which for them is truly exotic, rather than what is, to them, the dull, pedestrian world of touring around Europe.

To those of us who were born in younger countries, there is nothing more romantic, more exotic, more appealing, more evocative of wealth, leisure, culture, Bohemianism and freedom than to wander the streets of a European city. We dream and save our money for our once-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe, on which we are usually tragically crammed into tourist buses and youth hostels and package tours and Club Med resorts, isolated by tourism itself from any contact with what makes the European cities European.

Europe represents something to those of us who grew up elsewhere, something in the nature of a dream, a goal, a life ambition. When we list what we will do with out lottery win, the European trip usually gets a place. When we plan what we will do when we graduate, the European trip is right up there with buying a car and eating out somewhere other than McDonalds.

Europe is a destination of romance. More than anything else, Europe is an emotional destination. Europe is the place where dreams come true.

The ultimate expression of wealth, for those of us in the southern hemisphere, is to spend summers in Europe. Not only is it warm there when it's cold at home, but Europe is such an expensive place that summering there is the height of decadent wastefulness and hedonism. Europe represents the truimph of passion over common sense and conformity.

Not to Europeans, of course. They have to go to Asia or Australia to find the same sense of liberation and release.

But for us, the European wind in our hair is the ultimate lover's caress. To go to Europe is to run away, to abandon responsibility, morality, decency, obligation, steadiness, predictability, routine, and the pruning of rose bushes. To go to Europe is to return to oneself, to go back in history to a time before conventionality had taken its current straightjacket form.

The promise of Europe, to those of us who grew up far from Europe, is the promise of romance, or freedom, of passion, the promise that life can be about something more than paying the bills and doing what good people do. The promise of Europe is that life can be for LIVING, with gusto, with joi de vivre, with förtjusning!

And if you take away the promise, the hope, that Europe represents, you find, as did Lucy Jordan, that what remains of the average life is something that we may not wish to contemplate.

The morning sun touched lightly on the eyes of Lucy Jordan

In a white suburban bedroom in a white suburban town

As she lay there 'neath the covers dreaming of a thousand lovers

Till the world turned to orange and the room went spinning round

.

At the age of thirty-seven she realised she'd never

Ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair

So she let the phone keep ringing and she sat there softly singing

Little nursery rhymes she'd memorised in her daddy's easy chair

.

Her husband, he's off to work and the kids are off to school

And there are, oh, so many ways for her to spend the day

She could clean the house for hours or rearrange the flowers

Or run naked through the shady street screaming all the way

.

At the age of thirty-seven she realised she'd never

Ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair

So she let the phone keep ringing as she sat there softly singing

Pretty nursery rhymes she'd memorised in her daddy's easy chair

.

The evening sun touched gently on the eyes of Lucy Jordan

On the roof top where she climbed when all the laughter grew too loud

And she bowed and curtsied to the man who reached and offered her his hand

And he led her down to the long white car that waited past the crowd

.

At the age of thirty-seven she knew she'd found forever

As she rode along through Paris with the warm wind in her hair.

Today I stood on a bridge in Stockholm's Gamla Stan, and I looked at the water. in one direction, the water and the buildings could have been anywhere, perhaps even my home city of Sydney, Australia. But in the other direction, the view was unmistakeably a view of a European city.

It's not Paris, but then I never pinned my hopes on Paris in particular. I just thought that one day, when I am rich, I will spend my summers in Europe. Somewhere in Europe. I never would have guessed to would be Stockholm, but then, that is part of the joy of the journey of discovery.

At the age of 37, I realised that all my life I had lived by rules that I didn't write myself.

At the age of 37, I swore that I would take back all the price that I had paid.

At the age of 37, I killed the person I had been and started over, learning how to truly be alive.

Today, in Stockholm, I found myself singing the Ballad of Lucy Jordan to myself. Like Lucy, I had my moment of crisis. Unlike Lucy, when faced with the incompatibility between the real me and my life as a service centre for husband, children, community and garden, I chose to fight.

I still have my husband.

My children are happy and healthy.

But I also have Europe.

Unlike Lucy Jordan, I have made it to the other side. Without going crazy, without jumping off a roof, without leaving any vital task undone, yet I have managed to incorporate into my life all the Europe represents - passion, variety, culture, intellect, beauty, history, hedonism, and the sheer, throat-growling joy of being alive.

So much can be evoked by the sight of four-storey walk-up apartments over shops on narrow cobbled streets.

How much better it is to end the story in Europe for real, than to end as poor Lucy does, choosing to surrendering life itself rather than live in a Europeless manner for another fifty years. The only thing worse than death is the living death of pretending to be happy in a life that's not your own.

What is the dream for you, the one which represents freedom, passion, pleasure, and the joy of being alive? And how close are you to giving up on it?

It is nearer than you can ever imagine.

Images: Hector Melo A, plindberg, t.ume, motumboe