When circumstances quench our dreams

Are we allowing our circumstances to stop us dreaming?

We finished off last week by looking at six key elements that will all be involved in the process of moving towards living the life of our dreams. The fifth of these stated that we need to “be realistic about our circumstances and yet not limited by them“.

In many ways this has been at the back of my mind during all of last weeks posts.

I’m very aware of two opposing yet significant dangers:

• Having a dream that is not founded upon a healthy degree of realism
• Having no ability to dream beyond the reality of circumstances

Today we’ll focus on the second of these.

I can almost hear some people saying, ‘All this talk of dreaming is great, but what about…’. And they’re right. Life doesn’t come to most of us exactly the way we want it. Life isn’t predictable or controllable. Sometimes the circumstances that life throws at us will mean that we’ll have to give up on some dreams or at the very least change or delay them. This can be so, so hard. Laying down a dream can feel like letting a piece of us die.

It is in these situations that we need to take on the challenge of letting a dream die whilst not giving up on dreaming. Without a dream we have nothing to hope for, and without hope we are no longer living; just existing.

That relationship may have come to an end, but we’ll find someone else to go through life and pursue new dreams with. We may have lost this job, but there’ll be other opportunities for us to pursue. Circumstances are constantly changing. They may have changed for the worst right now, but we can make choices that can create new possibilities out of those very circumstances.

So for those of us who have allowed our circumstances to quench our dreaming, it’s time to seize the moment and allow ourselves to dream again. It might not be the same dream, but that’s ok. We need to dream. We need to have something to aim for, live for, and pursue. Without a dream, without a sense of something to live for, without a sense of vision and direction, we are allowing ourselves to merely exist and no longer fully live.

ADD YOUR VOICE

Have there been times when you know you have allowed circumstances to quench your ability to dream? How has this affected you? What did you learn? How did start dreaming again?

Maybe some of us are in this place of having no dream right now. What questions do you have? What are you finding particularly hard right now? What would help you start to dream again?

Why not share a few thoughts here?

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Tagged as: Dreams, Life