Nothing Much Happens Without A Dream

By Tara Mibus

As a kid, I remember constantly dreaming about what I would be when I grew up – on the playground I imagined our small balance beam in an Olympic arena; on long summer days I dove into piles of books and pictured my own stories in print; on weekends I groomed my model horses and looked forward to the day I would train horses for a living. My dreams about what I would be when I grew up may have varied wildly, but each and every one was filled with vividness and passion. And that excitement motivated me to do something. I took gymnastics. I wrote stories, bound them, and “published” them to family. Being horseless, I saved my allowance for technique books and practiced my horsemanship skills on a barrel.

So far, I haven’t grown up to be any of the things I dreamed about. But more importantly, somewhere along the way I stopped dreaming about those things at all. I started to dream small and act small – or, as I would have put it, I became realistic. I met with high school counselors about my career path. I fretted over what job I could get after college. I focused on what seemed practical and achievable, and I forgot about my dreams. They didn’t seem to serve a purpose anymore.

Has your life, like mine, become too small for big dreams? Have you bought into the line that they’re a waste of time when real life is pressing? When was the last time “dream” made it on your to-do list? As adults, we don’t often think of dreaming as a practical priority. But there is a critical reason why you need to put it back in your life, as Ann McGee-Cooper and Duane Trammell explain.

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