Have you ever noticed that when we dream, it’s never full of text on a paper describing something? Rather dreams are as real as the reality we live in daily: full of life, color, vivid, and bursting with energy; like a picture worth 10,000 words. They seem so real at the time and then they fade from our life. Yet they are still back there, waiting and wanting to come to life. And that is how a lot of the dreams are that we hope to achieve. They seem so real in the moment, like we can almost reach out and touch them. Then life hits with all the concerns and we lose track of them as we get into our daily grind.
A key to moving toward living our dreams is to keep ourselves aware of them and not let them fade from our memory. My friend, Ken Radtke is a dreamer. He starts each year by painting a picture of the dreams he wants to achieve and live. Sometime it’s more a collage of pictures verse hand drawn. But in both cases, he puts them on a 9 by 11, or 11 by 18 piece of paper and hangs them in his home office. Something he sees everyday that reminds him of the dreams he is pursuing.
In other cases, it can be a dream you see everyday when you are outside. Which for me is my hiking dreams calling to me as I drive down the front range from Monument to Colorado Springs and see the peaks/mountains/trails of: Sundance, Cap Rock, Chautauqua, Raspberry, Herman, Blodgett, Bottomless Pit, Rosa, and others. And my dreams aren’t the same as other people have because everyone else on I-25 is seeing these same mountains, but not in the way I’m seeing them. So keep in mind that your dreams are your dreams. You may become a part of helping someone else fulfill their dream, but it’s still their dream. Seek to live out the dream(s) that you have in your heart, mind and soul.
We need to keep our dreams alive as some of them may take years to achieve. For me it was hiking the Grand Canyon Rim to Rim. I first saw the Grand Canyon from the South Rim in 1981 when doing a bicycle ride from the Grand Canyons to Salt Lake City with Russ Brown. I remember staring across that vast chasm, wondering what it would be like to hike across it. The dream faded from reality as time went on with the responsibilities of “life” taking over. Occasionally the dream would come back as we did family vacation visits to the Grand Canyon and over time and it really began to have roots when I realized the Grand Canyon is only a one-day drive from our home. So I went from staring across the Grand Canyon in 1981, to hiking it from the north rim to the south rim in one day in 2016 with Ovi Truta and Erik Lane. Almost 35 years later to the day I first saw the canyon.
What are the dream(s), that have been dormant in your life that you need to starting making plans for this year or in the next few years? And don’t limit the size of your dreams. As Mark Batterson says in the title of his book “Chase the Lion: If your dream doesn’t scare you, it’s too small.” What dreams do you have in your hiking, personal, and professional life that you need to re-awaken? It’s time to start dreaming with your eyes wide open and vividly see where your dreams want to take you. Or as the words say in the song “Come Alive” from recent hit musical “The Greatest Showman”:
And you’re more than you could ever be
Cause you’re dreaming with your eyes wide open
And you know you can’t go back again
to the world that you were livin’ in
Cause you’re dreaming with your eyes wide open
So Come alive
Start coming alive and dare to live the dreams in your life. You will never go back, once you start living them.
Al Andersen 