For Those With Hopes & Dreams
Seldom in life is everything in our homes, our gardens, our property, our environment perfect or exactly how we wish it to be. We think about this, sometimes fleetingly as we dash through, sometimes with more reflection and pause, but we think about how things might be, how life could be better, easier, more fitting. We may even squeak out a dream. An imagined tweak here, a tweak there. Add this in, take that away. Remodel that bathroom, the kitchen. Reupholster that chair. Paint the walls. Build the fence. But then, we get pulled along by the current of things, of schedule, of life, of overwhelm, perhaps, by the scope of it all and where to begin, and there sits undone the very things we’re wishing were complete.
Time clicks by. Before we know it, years may have passed, and here we still are. Somehow, oddly, it’s easier to live with the ill-fitting, even the unfinished present, than it is to actively step into change and create a new reality. We become caught by our own hopes and dreams, held in an uncomfortable middle-place, safe from overwhelm, safe from unknown difficulties, safe from making mistakes. Safe, but captive, the hope for change being just enough to keep us from actually making that change.
Loves, dreams and hopes alone will get us nowhere.
I sat in the Adirondack chair near the creek in the late afternoon shade, birds chirping, creek flowing, insects buzzing by. There, across the lawn in front of me, was a new heather fence, six feet high and forty feet long. It marked a boundary, became a backdrop, a screen, a woven wall. And I could not believe how it changed my world. I’d sat in that chair by that creek on many summer days. This time, the whole experience was gloriously different. The same place was somehow new, a remarkable reality, a complete and deep fulfillment of what I’d envisioned for so long. I felt myself relax, breathing deeply, soaking in the beauty of a dream come true. There I stayed until the sun softened and the shadows grew long.
For those of us who find ourselves held captive by our own hopes and dreams, I give us this:
Write the vision down. Gather inspiration. Write the first action, and the next, and the one after that. Make the first contact. Make the next. Set aside the money. Schedule the laborers and the skilled (schedule yourself if that’s you). Ask for the gift. There will be bumps along the way, maybe even mistakes, and that’s okay. Keep going. See the end.
Loves? There’s a reality beyond your hopes and dreams that I so want you to experience. Don’t wait.
Have the loveliest of weekends, friends.
