Believe in the Beauty of Dreams
Little children come into this world with big dreams. They believe in themselves and are so sure they can achieve anything they can dream. Then adults enter the picture and start telling them to be realistic. A child wants to be president, or an astronaut, or a billionaire. Then someone looks them in their innocent, bright, hopeful eyes and says, “That’s nice but…”
How do I know this? Because I have taught these children when they were young and when they were in college, and I have seen the fire leave their bellies for the dreams they once had. By the time they reached my college classroom, most had even forgotten what they once wanted to do or be. Most of them focus on the money they want to make.
Sure, there will always be people saying it can’t happen because that is just how some people are, negative. What if the Wright brothers were made to believe that their dream of flying was a waste of time? What if Thomas Edison’s mother had believed his headmaster’s assessment that little Tommy was incapable of learning?
Well-meaning adults often believe they are preventing children from disappointment when they tell them to be realistic. It is likely that most of those adults heard the same thing when they were children. It is high time that we stop clipping our children’s wings and begin watching to see how high they can fly.
When a child aspires to do or be something, we need to be supportive. Looking into the discouraged eyes of many of my students, I can tell you that every one of them once had a dream. Sometimes I was able to help them remember what that was, but for many I could not convince them that money alone was not going to fill that hole in their hearts.
If you are reading this and think I am not facing reality, I am going to shoot back at you, “How do you know what is real?” When only birds flew in the sky, the reality was that people didn’t fly. When the only way to get in touch with your neighbor was to holler across a field, the idea of a telephone was beyond the imagination of most people. The smartphone began in someone’s imagination because the idea that one day we would hold in the palm of our hand a telephone, camera, stereo, calculator, television, video player, library, and on and on goes the list, would have been laughed away by those who only believe in what they can see.
So, let your child, grandchild, niece, nephew, student, little brother or sister believe they can become an astronaut or president or inventor of a time travel machine. Let them have their imaginations because that is going to be their key to a beautiful life. Sure, life will throw some curveballs, but there is no harm in that. Struggle builds character and helps us decide what is worth pursuing. The easy life doesn’t exist. Humans are meant to grow, and challenge is the fertilizer.
If you had your dreams crushed, it is never too late to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and begin. Stop believing all the naysayers. They aren’t the ones changing the world anyway. The ones who believe in the beauty of their dreams will encourage you to do the same. What if when little Sara Blakely was a tiny, towheaded child she told someone she was going to be a self-made billionaire when she grew up, and that person patted her on the head and said, “Honey, that is nice but just not practical?” Women around the world would not have had access to her products and made her company, Spanx, the multi-billion-dollar enterprise it is today.
It is time to understand that reality is something that is made. If you don’t believe me, just consider where you are reading this blog post. Let children dream again and start by believing in your own dreams.
Background Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash