About three years ago, I decided I needed help in wrangling with some issues in my inner life, and I called up a counselor I had seen for a season a decade earlier. We reconnected in an initial visit, and then reconvened into a routine of weekly visits.

Why was I there? What did I want?

I just knew then that my life felt stilted, muted, and stalled, and despite my wishes for change, I wasn’t able to change anything on my own. And that was hurting me.

It took months for us to finally wander into that thicket, and talking with him a week at a time, for me to feel able to let down my guard and to show some of myself to him. I’m not really the best at disclosing myself.

And after the fact, I realized that it also took that long for me to open up with him because I was struggling to let down my guard and show some of myself… to me.

Because it is painful to admit to yourself that in some areas of your life, in some of the ways you deal with things, you aren’t doing it well. At all.

And I knew I was there.

It took a dream one night to help me see why I was meeting wit him- and in time, with the start of the pandemic, why I also stopped visiting him.

In this dream, I was anticipating setting out on a road trip, and so I got into a car, and while in the seat, I waited for it to go. The morning coolness of the day turned into the heat of the afternoon, and I started feeling anxious and impatient, wondering why I was still sitting in this lot. And then as the day rolled into the purple and orange of twilight, and I remained in the car, my feelings rolled into a mixed sense off panic and rage. And sadness.

In my dream, the seat in the car I had sat down into was the passenger seat.

Awaking fitfully from this vision, I had a moment of clarity that underscored the central issue I was feeling.

My chief reason for revisiting the counselor and trying to find some answers all tied into the image the dream had given to me.

I was, and had long been, unwilling to sit down into the driver’s seat of my life.

And that frustration, that source of pain, was the whole as to why I had gone to him for help.

And it left me in a conundrum.

I realized I was going to him expecting him to give me the power I needed to become a more courageous captain of my life, and yet, in time, the answer to my major issue was something he could not fix for me.

I shared with him about my dream in the following session, and after a mild investigation of its meaning, it was then swept beneath the undertow from other topics filling our later meetings.

And I felt myself getting frustrated with our sessions- because in them we would talk, about life, about issues, about feelings, but I would leave him each week feeling dissatisfied. Feeling the same stuckness.

And then when COVID hit the world in 2020, after a few more sessions of talking via internet video, I just knew it was time to stop our meetings.

Because I knew the main problem I was facing, and I felt like our work had hit a wall. The major problem was known. The solution- in choices I daily made- remained absent.

A year and some later, I think back to that dream off and on, and also to how my time with the counselor petered out, and about the anger and frustrations I often felt coming out of those later sessions with him, and I am a little more aware now about why things went the way they did.

I had wanted him to take steps for me he really couldn’t take. I had expected him, like a coach, to give me the power or bravery or energy I needed to sit down in the driver’s seat of my life and to take responsibility and control of it.

And I finally realized: he couldn’t.

But what he did do was bring me to a moment I needed to visit.

He brought me to the dream.

I can’t say I have progressed much farther down the road of captaining my life with any greater comfort or security.

But I can see the big problem now.

I strongly recognize that tendency in my personality which hampers my personal growth and denies opportunities in my life.

It is my habitual acquiescence to put myself into the comfort and safety- and passivity- of the passenger seat in life.

Because to sit in the driver’s seat requires that you are fully responsible for where you are going, and how you get there.

Fears. Fear of trying. Fear of failing.

Which, often, as the issue behind the issue, scares me tremendously.

So, today, as I am living my life now, this daily challenge remains- will I live my life taking charge of it, navigating, accepting what comes into it out of my choices, or will I continue living as I am used to in the past, largely by default, accepting whatever I can skim for myself as I let situations and circumstances push it along like a raft in a flood.

Yes, I am kind of afraid of you, driver’s seat.

There. I said it.

But it’s time I deal with that. Because the alternative is a river of regrets.