The Convergence of Change

When I was a kid, I used to have this recurring dream. I was sitting in a circle inside an old tipi. What I remember most clearly is the stillness. The walls were empty, unfinished or awaiting the artwork almost, which always struck me as strange because tipis usually tell a big story with the artwork. I sat there among my great-great-grandparents, many generations back. No one ever spoke, but the dream always ended at the same moment, just before it felt like words were about to be shared. You could feel the intention hanging in the air.

One morning, not long after one of those dreams, I told my mom that I thought I was born 100 years too late. I remember saying that maybe if I had been born earlier, I would understand my purpose better. At the time, it felt like a passing thought. Something a kid says when they’re trying to place themselves in the world. I didn’t dwell on it. Life moved on.

It wasn’t until I became an adult that the dream returned with weight.

One morning, after waking from that same dream, I wrote down two sentences in my journal:

“As nêhiyaw, we must be able to use our gifts to take action for the coming generations.”

“Paint the story of change and your narrative is where resilience can thrive.”

At the time, I didn’t fully understand what I had written. I just knew it felt important. Those words stayed with me for a while, then like many things, they were tucked away as life got busy. School. Work. Trying to figure out who I was supposed to be. Trying to be useful. Trying to belong.

For years, I felt lost and without purpose.

Not in an obvious way, and from the outside, everything looked fine. I was doing what I was supposed to do. I was achieving, learning, building. But underneath that motion was a quiet disconnect. A sense that I was moving forward without fully understanding why. As if I was walking a path without being able to see where it began or who had walked it before me or even who was supposed to walk beside me.

Recently, I found one of my old journals and reread those words.

This time, they landed differently.

I no longer believe I was born too late. I think I was born at a point of convergence.

We are living in a time where stories are being questioned, systems are being re-examined, and old assumptions are no longer holding. There is grief in that. There is tension. But there is also possibility. The blank walls of that tipi from my dream make more sense now, not like absence or missing, but as space. Space to paint. Space to tell the story forward.

Purpose, I’ve learned, isn’t something you discover all at once. It reveals itself as you move, as you try, as you fail, as you return. It lives in action, not certainty. It lives in choosing to use what you’ve been given, skills, voice, access, perspective all in service of those who come next.

Our story is artwork in progress.

It is shaped by where we come from, but it is not finished. Each choice, each risk, each act of care adds another line, another layer of colour. Resilience doesn’t live in perfection; it lives in the telling, in the willingness to keep painting even when the image isn’t clear yet.

Maybe the dream never needed words spoken out loud. Maybe the message was always about listening to time, to memory, to responsibility, and to the knowing that we are here to carry something forward.