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what it feels like when your dreams come true
peak experiences and clarice lispector's state of grace
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What does it feel like when everything is finally “as it should be”? When everything you’re anticipating is here and done, when you get out of the uncertainty and into having what you want?
I think a lot about how the moments when our dreams come true are just that: moments. They’re brief moments that arrive, they’re here, and then they’re done. So if we’re not as present as humanly possible in those moments, we let ourselves be blind to the experience of them; and then what is the point of it all if we don’t notice it? It’s very easy to get excited for a second, barely acknowledge that you are exactly where you’ve wanted to be for so long, and then move on to the next thing.
It scares me how easy it is for that to happen. Because within those moments, we can find so much aliveness; but only if we’re awake to them. If a life well lived is made up of as many beautiful moments of true aliveness as possible, then our primary job is learn how to be fully present, to suck the marrow out of every such experience.
In Abraham Maslow’s theory of the hierarchy of human needs, our needs are a pyramid with essential basics at the bottom, such as physiological and safety needs, belonging and love in the middle, topped by esteem and finally self-actualisation. This top part, self-actualisation, is what we often refer to when we talk of feeling completely aligned, entirely at peace with who we want to be.
When we find ourselves near the top of the pyramid, we can sometimes experience these moments that Maslow calls peak experiences. It’s great to have language for something that’s often so hard for us to describe or even identify when we’re in it. Peak experiences don’t happen often – but by definition, they can happen for everyone, in everyday life. Maslow describes them as brief moments of intense and profound joy and meaning, when someone feels as alive as possible. They can involve a sense of wonder or ecstasy; they feel like more than just a pleasant mood. Within those experiences we get to feel almost the peak of our joy – a sense that everything is exactly as it should be, awe bundled with relief.
I can identify a few of these moments in my life, that have stayed in my memory because the sense of complete peace was so all-encompassing that I almost didn’t know what to do with it. In the first one that I can remember, I was 17. I remember it clear as day, because it was a time where after years and years of nothing feeling right, everything had finally fallen into place exactly as I’d hoped, or even better; and I remember walking and feeling the sun on my face and having an overwhelming, embodied sense that this is it. I still remember it vividly nine years later, how I clung to that feeling with this sense of “please let this not slip away”.
In An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures, Clarice Lispector writes of what she calls “a state of grace”. Her protagonist, Lóri, spends the book journeying from numbness to aliveness. Towards the end, she has one of these peak experiences: she enters a state where everything feels luminous and vibrant, where the beauty in ordinary things that previously went unnoticed gains new magnitude, where she feels as aligned as one can be, permeated by a sense of radiance and deep aliveness. To me, this fleeting experience Lispector describes is what Maslow also wrote about, it’s what we get to access ourselves when we learn to be present and awake to it.
A few months ago, I had one of these experiences again, when something finally came to fruition that I had been hoping for and deeply anticipating for so long. It was one of those moments where I thought to myself “well, it’s done!”, all the uncertainty concluding with a bang, only for me to realise I was now finally on the other side, the side where it was done, completed, a dream come true. I went to the park the next morning and sat on a bench reading and writing for six hours. For six whole hours I did nothing but sit in the sun, with my thoughts, noticing everything (and also getting a little sunburnt).
I felt a deeper sense of peace than I had felt in a very long time, and realised I owed it to myself to notice everything inside that experience, because that is all there is to it. That experience I was in, that feeling of peace, wouldn’t be experienced in any other way besides this one, me deeply noticing it by giving it my full attention.
On that bench, I wrote in my journal:
“I have this tendency to think of peace as something quiet and neutral, almost like an absence of something else; whereas to me, right now, peace is actually inseparable from a kind of nagging presence, the sensation of knowing that this is it. Once you know that, it can barely feel quiet - it feels like a violent aliveness, the piercing arrow of joy, easy to mistake for an abstract melancholy. Maybe it’s the melancholy of knowing it is temporary?
Does that mean every single thing is solved and perfect? I do still have questions, but the difference is that they’re not problems. Not every question is a problem, I learned, and in some questions I can feel content and happy. Some questions I can face with peace. The light breeze just paused its dance again and the sun’s warmth engulfed me in a full-body hug, so warm it forced me to face this present sense and to make sure it doesn’t go unnoticed, so momentary it is.”
If one of your values is aliveness, to experience as much of life as possible or as Clarice Lispector writes, “everything the most human of humans have”, then being awake to noticing your feelings and being fully present with them is all you can do.
Sometimes we look outside of ourselves for something grand and incredible to announce itself as happiness finally having arrived; but really, the amount of joy we can experience heavily depends on our willingness to be fully present inside the simple moments where everything clicks into place, when we’re lucky enough to find ourselves there.
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