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 expected 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 like 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 planet earth that could have benefitted, however indirectly, from your finding the courage to dream bigger in your life. Even worse than selling out your spouse, children, parents, friends, 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 dreams and the 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 dreams 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 thoughts that make up the dream must 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 important than knowledge.” Envision the image you want to be, and it will become reality.

The experience of Ryan Hreljac is a source of inspiration in this regard. In 1998,

Ryan, a six-year-old girl, learned 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 did at home. In 4 weeks, she earned $70 and contacted a charity that builds wells in Africa. She was made to realize that it would cost her $2,000 to build such a well. In order not to give up her dream, she did more household jobs and contacted several people to support/donate toward her dream. Since 1998, the money raised by the Ryan's Well Foundation has built more than 300 wells in fifteen countries in Africa, improving the lives of over half a million people. If that is what a six-year-old’s dream can create, then imagine what yours can.

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

Ø  Your dreams propel your life in the direction that inspires you. They bring a profound sense of meaning and purpose to your day-to-day experience of being alive.

Ø  They allow you to ask for more from life than you otherwise would.

Ø  They connect you to the secret source of your creativity and intuition. They have 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, extraordinary coincidences 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,” which occurs when a patch is placed over a young child’s healthy eye. When the patch is removed, the child has completely lost sight in that once good eye. Covering the eye stunts its development and causes blindness. Many of us suffer from this form of “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 as 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 but are buried at 60. Remember, nothing can stop a person who refuses to stop. If you are not pursuing your dreams, you are fueling your limitations.

So, my question to you is: What is your dream? Whatever it is, please live it. Begin to work on it; boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. At every moment of every day, 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 in such a way 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 their own

 

 

Culled from “Courage” by Margie Warrel