There are Those Who Dream

Guest Blogger: Ken La Salle

After writing a year’s worth of blog entries here on Recovering The Self, I was feeling very pleased with myself. I had started out unsure about my ability to even talk about following your dream and had ended the year able to announce publication of Climbing Maya, which was a dream of my own! Surely, it didn’t get much better than that.

And that’s when Vicky said, “But not everybody is like you. Not everyone has dreams.”

The problem with marrying someone who is your intellectual equal is they tend to be right pretty often.

Was it possible that my gung-ho attitude towards pursuing your dreams wasn’t as universal as I thought? Let’s recap: I’ve been pursuing my dream of being a writer for nearly 30 years, writing novels, non-fiction, plays, poems, whatever I could come up with and lots of it. I also dream of cycling my next century and being a better runner, of losing a little weight (okay, a lot of weight), and on and on. My life is all about working on my dreams and making them come true.

The problem, I realized, is that not everybody can be so gung-ho. Vicky’s point is one I tend to forget: that most people are just trying to make a living, have a life… get through. Vicky can’t relate to my method of setting your sights on the horizon and striving to get there because she lives very differently, a lot more sensibly. She sets a goal down the road a ways and gets there easily, then she sets another goal another short distance beyond, and another, and another. It isn’t nearly as exciting as setting sail for the horizon but, you know what? It works. It makes sense.

But isn’t that also a dream?

One of the things Vicky loves to do is teach, which she now does as the result of a hundred choices she made along the way. When I realized that teaching is just as much a dream for her as any of my dreams, I knew that we were looking at the same thing from a different perspective.

And what is that? What is a dream? What makes it worthwhile?

Dreams don’t have to be out on the horizon, though they can be. You can decide you want to devote your life to some extraordinary goal or you can commit yourself to something more sensible and achievable. A dream can be something very personal or it can involve the world. Dreams can take you on the journey of a lifetime or they can be a goal just a few months out. They’re all dreams.

And you make them worthwhile. You do this with your decision to commit yourself to making them come true. Without commitment, dreams are worthless. They’re nothing more than wishful thinking, sitting on your sofa and saying, “I wish I could do that.” When you make your dream worthwhile, you provide worth to yourself as well.

That’s how I feel when I go cycling, which is a good, short-term dream because the dream is also in the doing. It’s how Vicky feels when she teaches, and when she creates her next dream and her next. Making a living as a writer is not something I do, yet; but every move in that direction is worthwhile.

Sure, you can plug in different synonyms like “goal” or “objective” and if that helps you make things happen, you should do that. I recognize them as dreams because I feel it invests the correct amount of importance in the undertaking. Anyone can have a goal or objective but… a dream? A dream that will fill your heart and make your life so much more than it might be otherwise? Those are special.

And we all have them.

And I firmly believe that life is never fully lived if we’re not going after them. It’s certainly a lot more fun.

About the Author

Ken La Salle

You can find out more about Ken La Salle at www.kenlasalle.com. Climbing Maya, An Exploration Into Success by Ken La Salle is now available from all major e-tailers by Solstice Publishing (http://www.solsticepublishing.com/).

• Fulfilling Your Dreams
• Ken La Salle
• recovering the self