THE COURAGE TO DREAM BIGGER DREAMS

What is your dream in life? My dream is to move people from where they are presently, to where they never expect to be in life in terms of personal success.

-          Dreaming creates a gap between your present reality and the reality you want to have, thus causing you to question whether you can bridge the gap.

The greater danger is not that your dreams are too high in the sky, exciting, and you don’t reach them, it’s actually that they are too small and dull, that you can do or reach them easily.

When you choose not to dream, you are giving up a unique opportunity, since no one else has the talents, life experience and imagination as you; there are wonderful things that you and only you will ever be able to dream of doing. So if you don’t dream, you are aiming lower in life than you are worthy of. In doing so, you are selling out everyone else on the planet earth that could have benefit however indirectly from your finding the courage to dream bigger in your life. Even worse than selling out, your spouse, your children or your parents or friends or your community or country you are selling out yourself.

However old you are, it is never too late to begin to want more for your life and dare to give more to it.

French writer, Anais Nin wrote: “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to your dream and courage to dream bigger dreams”

Dreams have a lasting impact on our experience of being alive and enrich the quality of our life exponentially. Exciting dreams create exciting life.

We all have different passions, abilities, gifts and personalities that inspire different dreams. Whatever dream you have, you have them for a reason, after all, you wouldn’t be able to dream about something if it weren’t already inside you.

The thought that make up the dream has to be inspired from within you. Someone else can help nurture your dream, giving it space to breathe and water to grow, but no one can fabricate a dream and pass it to you. Before anything can become tangible it must first be imagined. According to Albert Einstein – Imagination is more than knowledge, envision the image you want to be and it will become reality.

The experience of Ryan Hrelja, is a source of inspiration in this regard. In 1998, Ryan, six (6) years old girl, learnt from her first grade teacher that millions of kids in Africa were ill or dying because they lacked a basic need - access to clean water and that $70 could build or drill a well and save many lives

Ryan went home that day with a dream of raising money to build wells for people who could not have clean water.

She asked her parents in Ontario, Canada to pay her for small household jobs she does at home. In 4 weeks she earned $70 and contacted a charity that builds wells in Africa. She was made to realize that it will cost her $2000 to build such well.

In order not to give up her dream, she did more household jobs and contacted several people to support/donate towards her dream.

Since 1998, the money raised by Ryan Well Foundation has built more than 300 wells in fifteen (15) countries in Africa, improving forever the life of over half a million people. If that is what a six (6) years old dream can create, then imagine what yours can!

Several benefits accrue to you as you dream bigger dreams for yourself.

·         Your dreams propel your life in the direction that inspires you. It brings a profound sense of meaning and purpose to your day to day experience of being alive.

·         It allows you to ask for more from life than you otherwise would.

·         It connects you to the secret source of your creativity and intuition. It has the power to unleash positive energy into and around your life.

Once you have a dream in your heart and mind that is inspiring you, extra-ordinarily coincidencies begin to occur. Life becomes serendipitous in ways you may have never experienced before.

However, some of us suffer from a medical condition called “amblyopia”, a condition that occurs when a patch is placed over a young child’s healthy eye.  When the patch is removed, the child has completely lost sight of that once good eye.  Covering the eye stunts its development and causes blindness.  Many of us suffer from this form “amblyopia”.  We go through life with blinders over our eyes, afraid to dream bigger dreams and do things we fear.  The result is always the same like the child with “amblyopia”.  We eventually lose our vision and spend the rest of our days within a very limited zone of movement.  Too many of us live small lives, too many of us die at 20 (years) but are buried at 60 (years old).  Remember, nothing can stop a person that refuses to stop.  If you are not pursuing your dreams, you are fuelling your limitations.

So my question to you is what is your dream? Whatever it is, please live it. Begin to work in it; boldness has genius, power and magic in it. At every moment of everyday, you have a bank of courage waiting for you to draw on it to live a little bigger, act a little bolder and reveal your full brilliance to the world such that it radiates outward to others, revealing their own talents to them. The most wonderful deed you can ever do for someone is not to share your riches with them but to help them reveal his or her own.

It’s half year 2012 – live your dream.

Culled from “Courage” by Margie Warrel