Tag: dreams

Do your Dreams have an Expiry Date?

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Dreams are meant to be followed. Have the courage to follow yours. Do things that challenge you, scare you, and make you feel alive.

Liz Pearson

Have you ever found yourself struggling with frustration during these difficult days because your most cherished hopes and dreams seem elusive and outside of your reach? When we are unable to meet our deeply held dreams and goals in our lives, we may feel that our lives have become stagnant, lacking in purpose, or that we have drifted off course.

At times, our life circumstances become the barriers to achieving the dreams that we cherish the most and secretly hold onto. There are a myriad of reasons that could prevent us from reaching our dreams at different points in our lives. Dreams may recede, lose their magnetic pull, be impractical, or simply become replaced by new ones.

Sometimes it appears that we have discarded our dreams and never expect them to play a part in our lives in the future. There are numerous possibilities that alter our life dreams. Self-doubt. Self-criticism. Inertia. Lack of time, resources, a global pandemic, etc.

But, do we need to give them up altogether, when daily living, responsibilities, and obligations may interfere with what we are most passionate about.

We have the ability to place dreams on hold rather than give them up completely. As we age, the internal clock that guides us, begins to tic louder and louder. We may begin to experience the urge to throw caution to the winds and face our challenges and our fears to try to move forward to realizing our dreams. For me, this urge has become stronger as I have become older.

Our time is limited and we should pay attention to those inner voices that prod us to take action. Dreams are meant to be pursued. You really never will know what is possible until you take a risk and move towards the dream that is calling to you. Begin someplace, anyplace, so long as you start to experience a sense of momentum.

Taking small steps towards what inspires passion and purpose within us becomes critical to our creative well-being. Roadblocks in our way simply suggest that it is time to pivot and find new ways to reach our goals, our hopes, and our dreams. This pandemic may have caused some of us to place dreams on hold in order to adapt to this new reality. But it shouldn’t mean that we lose them forever.

I don’t believe that our dreams have expiry dates – do you?

Stay healthy and safe!

Writing exercise for reinvention

As I end this year, I continue my reflection on my progress along this reinvention journey that I have been travelling on. My writing practice, which I typically find energizes both mind and spirit, has slowed and deepened. I find that I have been generating lists. Reflecting on them. Writing more lists. Lists and more lists.

Lists of things I tried and did not work out.

Lists of things I tried and did work out.

Lists of things I tried and did work out and now I no longer want to do.

Lists of things that I haven’t tried but want to.

Lists of things I haven’t tried but am afraid to.

Lists of things I don’t know how to even get started at.

So…I listened to a podcast featuring a woman named Meryl Cook who is a journal writer, artist, and creativity consultant. She described an ongoing exercise she does as part of her reinvention process that she called writing your What If’s. The exercise is to dream wildly and write What If you actually did that thing you have been thinking and dreaming of. What If you had the money, the time, the freedom to actually do that thing?

Use a What If exercise if you need to reframe things that are not going well in your life. What If you could actually do what you need skills and knowledge for but don’t yet have? What If you could actually do what you really want to but fear or busyness or something else gets in the way.

What If by writing down these wild dreams my reinvention journey is strengthened? What if some of the dreams I write down actually come true? My list writing to evaluate how my year has gone has now been replaced by What If exercises. What If the What If writing for reinvention exercise is actually helpful? I look forward to the upcoming year and using this What If writing exercise.