The Year Not to Defer Dreams - The New York Times

It wasn't an easy year, what with Trump and rude intrusions of mortality.  So the advice not to defer dreams is particularly warmly felt.  What are those dreams?  What does one dare - with many adventures once risky, now reckless off the table?  I've strengthened my boats, we've invited family to reunite in Maine, and vowed to do what we can to blunt the ongoing damage by the one I call the Dumpster.
The Year Not to Defer Dreams - The New York Times
by Roger Cohen

***Some cities waste the water on which they are set. London used to. Rome still does. Paris is the aqueous gold standard. I’ve watched New York embrace its waterfront over the years. Right beneath my window a lawn has been taking shape this year on Pier 3, Brooklyn Bridge Park’s last pier to be converted, and set to open in 2018. It will include a labyrinth.

The ferry’s a commuter service, of course. But at this time of year, it’s full of tourists gasping at the sunlight falling on the serried towers of Lower Manhattan, on the Statue of Liberty, on the derricks, like gangling metal dinosaurs, of New Jersey. New towers go up, yet to acquire, or having half-acquired, their gleaming outer coats of armor. How handsome the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is!

The boat crosses to Trump country, but its brief passage evokes the centuries of American hope invested in this city, seen by so many immigrants for the first time from this expanse of water. Here, suffering, famine and the endless gyre of Old-World conflict were set aside, or at least cushioned by New-World possibility.

At this low point for the United States, when truth itself is mocked from on high, that liberating message is worth recalling. Certainly, no naturalized American, as I am, who has witnessed the rites of passage of people drawn by hope from every corner of the earth to the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, can be indifferent to it.

I made the journey to Staten Island — beyond Montague, I know. We can’t always live up to our word. But we must keep trying. Avoid a high moral tone. Pay attention to detail. Wander aimlessly. Know, with Cavafy, what “these Ithacas mean.” Believe in, and provide for, the children who will inherit this earth. Yes, darling, that’s a boat. And that’s a labyrinth.

The night I took the Staten Island ferry, I went to a party. Each of us, after eating well, was asked to read or recount something close to the heart. One guest read Langston Hughes’s “Harlem”:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore —
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over —
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

In 2018, take the time, dear reader, to gaze at the familiar, board the ferry to nowhere — and do not, at risk of an explosion, defer your dreams.