When you look into the future, what do you see? What do you hear? What is possible?
Dreams are beautiful things, weightless to carry and entertaining to contemplate. It is easy to underestimate them as fantasy, to dismiss them as playful fiction.
Until you see one take hold.
When a dream seizes a person in a personal way, when they can see it, feel it, taste it, walk around inside of it, then a dream can become one of the most powerful forces on earth. It can alter a person’s life. It can make them rethink who they are and what they are capable of being.
Dreams change the world
So far we have talked about the courage to survive what happens to you. But there is another courage, an optional courage: the courage to be the one who creates the future.
Wrestling dreams into reality, making them true, is much more difficult than dreaming. Reality is stubborn and unyielding. There are powerful forces in your mind working toward keeping things the same. Your brain prefers what worked yesterday. It’s much easier. It is a known difficulty.
But a dream interrupts that stability. It has the power to seize your brain and build a whole new world of possibility right there in your head. Soon the dream becomes so temptingly delicious that you have to give it a try. It’s simply too strong to resist.
You’ve seen it
My daughter came home one day from school and asked the question,”What would you think if I wanted to be a nurse?” It was a bolt right out of the blue for us and a total change of direction for her. But she went on a school career trip to a hospital and it sparked a dream. Suddenly, everything changed.
It happened to me when I first walked into a recording studio. It happened for Olympian Bart Conner when his mother first took him to a gym. It was mesmerizing! At least for him.
It’s the,”I want to do that!” moment.
In some way, it has caused everything you see around you to exist. I’m writing this post on Steve Jobs’ dream, a MacBook Pro. I’m sitting in a coffee shop that was the dream of the doctor who lives next door. His dream built the entire art district around me. Someone’s dream began the city you live in.
But it’s easy to talk about distant, successful, celebrated dreamers like them. Their dreams are already visible. How about something more relevant.
Dreaming you
Dreams have also happened to you. You may not think of yourself as a dream builder, but you are. Whenever you imagine the life you want and do something to make it happen, you are making dreams come true. Your hopes in school, your career choice, where you want to live, what color your bedroom is are all dreams. Dating is a particularly courageous kind of dreaming. Having children is the best kind of dreaming. You are imagining a world of your own making.
But then begins the hard work of wrestling dreams to the ground. My daughter sweated through nursing school. Bart Conner started training. I began trying to find a way to get back into that studio. It’s difficult stuff.
It takes courage to wrestle dreams out of the clouds. It takes commitment, hard work and time. It takes opportunity and hard-headed determination. But in the beginning, if the dream is big enough, powerful enough, beautiful enough, then you find the courage.
The courage to dare to be great. To do and do again. To try until you succeed.
Moving toward the fear
Rather than simply surviving your fear or avoiding your fear, in this case you have to move toward the fear.
In fact, if you don’t reach the fear, you’re not doing enough. Fear means you’re doing something that hasn’t been done, or that you haven’t done yet. But everything in your past was once something you had never done. And look back at how well some of those untried things turned out.
Fear is a sign. It means growth. Progress. It means you are developing the courage within you. It means you have dreamed a dream big enough to be challenging. A dream worth dreaming. A dream worth all of the effort and sweat and pain it will take to make it come true.
A dream big enough to change you. And maybe change the world.
