Dreams

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined." –

Henry David Thoreau

We all have parts of ourselves that we have lost.  Or dismissed.  Dreams we had as a child.  Aspects of ourselves that we had to give up to "grow up".  Often, the dreams we let go were not because we wanted to, but because we were not given a choice.  Society demanded that we change, and we did.  Yet even though we were forced to change, our dreams never went away.  We just negotiated with ourselves. "The dream" is something we will get back to when we are older and have more control over our lives. 

Like cans in my pantry, my dreams as a child were front and center when first discovered, but slowly relegated to the back, replaced by "practical" dreams.  I would occasionally comb through my cupboard, but when the "cans" at the back were briefly uncovered, I assumed they were way past their expiration date.  So I threw them out without exploration. Worried that if I opened them up, the only thing waiting for me would be a good case of botulinum. 

Enter a story I saw on Instagram.  I have such a love/hate relationship with social media.  Most of it is just a distraction that eats up an amazing amount of time. Until I see something and…well, I guess it sees me back.  Such was a post I saw last week.  A woman posted about taking her daughter to her first horseback riding lesson.  After the lesson, she told her daughter about her own first horse, Bo.  The story was that Bo was her love, something she was so passionate about that she thought she would be around horses for the rest of her life.  Bo was with her through so many things as a young girl. He was her home, her respite.  I totally understand this as I watched my own daughter with her horse.  It IS a special bond.  A shared dream.

When she turned 16, her father gave her the impossible choice of selling Bo and getting a car or keeping him and walking everywhere.  She kept Bo only to find out that, even in Texas, it is illegal to ride a horse to school.  She was left with no choice and had to let Bo go.  But Bo never left her heart.   He was her soul and then her shadow; never far but never there.  As she told the story, her daughter wanted to know what happened to Bo. And then, with the innocence of a six-year-old asked her why she didn't try to find him.  It had been 20 years since she had seen Bo.  Yes, horses can live a long time but finding him would be a long shot.   

She started looking.  With little to go on, she finally sent out a request to the girls she used to ride with and, out of the blue, got a note from a man saying he knew Bo. He sent a photo of Bo standing next to two young girls holding ribbons from shows they had won while riding him.  She knew for sure it was him because in the photo, he was still wearing the halter she bought for him when she was twelve.  The man stated that his great Aunt has inherited Bo after the woman who owned him passed away.  She reached out to the great Aunt and found that Bo had been put out to pasture a year prior.  He was older and no one had time to ride him anyway.  Then the great Aunt asked, "Do you want him?" 

The woman said yes.  And two weeks after starting her search, Bo was delivered.  The video of her search and her reunion with Bo are below.  They are a must see.  Bring the Kleenex.  

Now, take Bo out of the above story and insert your childhood dream. What was your dream?  Who did you want to be?  Where did you find solace?  Who or what brought love and hope to your soul?  A clown, a dancer, a singer, actor, writer, painter?  Maybe you wanted to build things or travel or be a photographer?  A doctor, a veterinarian, a marine biologist swimming with the dolphins?  

Many of us try to keep our dreams alive through compromise.  Maybe you wanted to build a spectacular building or bridge, so you became an engineer. But you aren't building what you want, only what is asked of you by others.  I wanted to write.  And I did.  My job was mostly writing.  But I wrote legal documents, not anything from my heart.  I have a lot of creativity to catch up on, but not if I never start. 

The story of Bo simply reminded me that SO often, we put our love, our dreams, aside. To fit in.  To grow up.  To comply with the rules. We forget the magic of how we used to see the world, how we used to interact with it before IT told us how to be.  What a beautiful gift this woman gave her daughter.  How easy it would have been to dismiss the little girl’s question as an impossible dream.  What if she had simply told her daughter, and many of us would, "Oh, I'm sure Bo is no longer with us.  It was so very long ago."  Instead of dismissing her question, she got curious too.  She put in some effort and look what came her way.  She opened the can, and it was not filled with a poison.  It was filled with love, and she found something she thought was lost forever.  When Bo cuddles her, he looks equally amazed that they found each other again.

We never know what we will find when we look.  We are so quick with the words "can't" or "shouldn't." We speak them to ourselves before we even ask if there may be a possibility.  So used to dismissing our dreams that we don't even give them a chance to come out to play.  What if we get curious?  Ask ourselves what happened to our dreams?  Seek them out.  Ask them if they want to come home.

As L.L. Cool J once said to Oprah when she asked about his career, "DDND".  She looked confused, and he expanded, "Dreams don't have deadlines."  Dreams don't have deadlines.  WE are the only ones who are afraid to take them off the back shelf and open them.  

Dreams are not just our imagination.  They do not come to life unless we bring them into our lives, give them air, play with them.  Ask questions.  Our dreams will never be fulfilled unless we participate in our life.  We aren't here just to do what the world expects of us.  We are here to be who we dream of being.  Stop negotiating with your dream, saying that someday will be the right day for you to take it off the shelf.  Horses don't live forever and neither do we.  We do have an expiration date, and you never know what is out there waiting for you to find it and bring it home.  Happy hunting….

Searching for Bo:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DEYr6rHOcNZ/

Bo coming home:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DEfODPuxwC-/