If Your Dreams Seem Out of Reach…

You may be missing their true meaning.

We all start out hoping that one day we’ll be someone who makes a mark on the world. Someone who creates great art or writing or music or a new invention. Someone who becomes a leader, a healer, a teacher or a guide who helps others. We all have aspirations and dreams. Or we dream about having a dream by finding our purpose.

Over time, the ebbs and flows of life push and prod us. We get hurt and nurse our wounds. We get distracted and find ourselves off course. We get scared and backtrack. We find new courage and forge ahead.

In our heart of hearts, we know that we are powerful, creative, and divinely inspired. We know that we have gifts to share.

We also know that we are a gift.

But the simple reality is that not everyone will realize their dreams. Not in the way that you imagine. You might not become the film star or the sports figure or the renowned artist or the successful business person or the political maverick or the influencer or the guru or the person whose name everybody knows.

At some point, your world — or at least the opportunities you see — starts to shrink.

You get a bit older, and a little more tired, and the seeds of doubt you’ve tried not to water remain there, buried in the soil of your psyche, holding onto just enough life that when your tears flow from another disappointment, they start to grow.

Responsibilities, demands, and other tasks lay claim to your time.

You accept a smaller version of your dream. You tell yourself it’s good enough. You continue to work, create, and put yourself out there.

At some point, a certain kind of success seems to be beyond your reach, and others — younger, faster, fresher, and hungrier — start to climb ahead of you.

You world shrinks a little bit more. The revised dream gets revised again, maybe a little smaller, a little less ambitious. Or a lot, depending on what life has sent your way. Or you just stop looking for your life’s purpose, giving up on having a dream.

At a certain point, we begin to take stock, realizing that our time here is finite. We might put the dreams aside, however tiny they’ve become, thinking they’re no longer possible or realistic, or we might continue to march on.

Some might find that the dream blooms, out of nowhere, after decades of effort, blossoming into something wonderful. Others continue to carve out their place in the world, making peace with what that finally looks like.

Hopefully, along the way, we stop to look beyond our dreams at the friends we’ve made, the people we’ve loved, and the homes we’ve built.

We might look at the lives we’ve touched, and who have touched us along the way. We might take stock, and feel appreciation for good health, material comforts, or big adventures.

We might recall with sweet fondness the times we helped out others, held someone’s hand, or listened.

And in that moment, we might pause and see our dreams a little differently.

In fact, we might ask ourselves, Did I fulfill my dream, or was I a dream that life was having all along?

Maybe, just maybe, you were the dream that life wanted to have. Maybe life was dreaming of someone who had big dreams and along the way met loving and kind people, ate lots of great meals, had incredible sex, traveled, laughed a lot, learned to pour their heart out, and lent their ear when others needed to share.

Maybe life dreamed of you having lots of adventures along with some disappointments and failures — even ones that seemed soul-crushing at the time.

Maybe life dreamed of you running around pursuing dreams so that one day you might notice the beauty that had unfolded around you all the time.

Maybe life dreamed of you pursuing dreams whose goal was not to be realized and whose only purpose was to put you on a path where you would meet so many other incredible souls so that you might gift each other with your presence.

Maybe life dreamed of you as someone who learned to shed one kind of dream so that you could wake up and realize that you were the dream all along.

Many thanks to 𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘢 𝘊. for this week’s wonderful prompt on dreams.

Thanks to you for reading. May you find some inspiration in this piece for your own dreaming.