Let us talk about people’s dreams, shall we?
Everyone has a dream of some kind, an aspiration if you will. You could want to become a doctor, or maybe you want to go somewhere in your life, perhaps you want to travel, or maybe you want to become a teacher, a fire fighters, etc…
But what makes every dream different? There are many people following similar dreams. But however, it is not the dream, but the path you take to achieve that dream that makes a difference.
Let us take someone as an example…lets use me.
My dream is to become a professional novelist. This is not because I believe that it would secure my future, or perhaps give me a stable way of life. I understand the likely hood of a 17 year old girl with no spelling skills being able to become a professional novelist. Let us just say, the likely hood is minute.
However, it is as I said before, it is the path that I am taking to achieve that goal that makes me different.
To explain this, I’ll have to take you back to the beginning, to my first story.
I was in the basement of my old home, in Massachusetts. From what I can remember, I was drawing. No, not drawing; stenciling. I was 4 years old. There was an idea in my head, something powerful, something magical to me, something I’d never held onto before. Before, it had just been a mass of jumbled thoughts, never a solid, concrete idea.
I was known as the wild child, the loud one, (unlike now), so when my mother noticed how quiet I was being, she came over to my side of the basement to see what I was doing. I asked her to write down what I said.
And so, after gathering together the ingredients, neon pink poster paper, stencils, and crayons, I told my mother the story of the sunflower that lived in a lighthouse.
The sunflower was having a tea party, and was inviting all its friends. Every page showed the different “friends” traveling to the lighthouse. It was never going to be full fledged story, but the fact remained, I had written my first story, I had held onto my first concrete idea.
So, what is it that makes me different? My experiences. Everyone experiences things differently, sees the world through different eyes. Experiences brood ideas, such as , “what if this had happened instead of this?” or “what if things had been different?” or even, “what makes this experience special?”. And what do ideas do? They create stories.
So, I ask you this. What’s your story? What made you who you are today? What changed you from a little 4 year old to what you are now?
This brings me back to the idea of a dream. You see, a dream is an experience, something that you want in the future, something you want to happen either to you or to the world around you. I’ve told you my dream, I’ve told you the beginning of my path to follow that dream.
But what makes a dream a real dream, and not just a passing whim? Faith. I have faith that my love of writing, my love of using words to express the thousands of ideas in my head, I have faith that they will someday become meaningful to someone other than myself. I want to share my ideas and thoughts with the world; I want to show people what goes on inside my head. I want to succeed, not only to better myself as a writer, not only for my passion for the written word, but also so that others can see that even the dreams that seem so far away, so far out of reach, can indeed become reality.
And so, I ask you. What is your dream?
