Today’s Brilliance from Rachel Cherie Wood

Sometimes it seems like life flies by too fast. Sure, there are days where boredom stretches the hours or circumstances make a week feel like a year, but regular day-to-day living seems to have a tendency to accelerate over time.

The opportunities, ideas, and dreams we start off with as teenagers slip through our fingers as we push through college and stumble into adulthood trying to make heads or tails of what we’re supposed to do in life. We try and prioritize responsibly, putting first things like school, making money, and/or paying off debt. Often this cascade of to-dos never stops and before we know it, we’re older than we want to be with a shelf of dusty, untouched possibilities that were never explored.

So, what do we do? It’s important to put family first and be financially responsible, but that doesn’t mean you have to give up on your dreams. Sure, not all dreams are plausible. Not everyone can grow up to be the next sensation – the next Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe.

However, we can still find time to discover if some of our dreams can become a reality. It may not pan out exactly like we hope. In fact, it might not pan out at all. But, better that we try than leave our natural gifts untapped and indefinitely diminishing in the background.

It is also important not to get swept up in what we fantasize a dream will be like – the fame, fortune, or love we could have had. “What if?” seems to be a perpetual question amongst us today. Unfortunately, it’s a pointless question. We can’t go back and change events that have already occurred, yet we waste time wondering about it.

Instead of asking “What if?”, maybe we should ask questions more like “What should?” or “What could?” Look to the future instead of the cemented bygones. In this way we can reach forward rather than stare backwards. Live in today, not yesterday or ten years ago. Embrace and enrich our lives instead of letting them run through the proverbial hourglass.

As we pursue our dreams, we should expect them to be adaptive – reflective of and affected by their environment and the changes that occur around them. People change, so should dreams. Just because we had a dream as a child doesn’t mean we can’t still pursue it later in life, but we should accept it might not be exactly the same.

Decisions change the direction our lives go every day, but that doesn’t mean we can’t go after our dream – even if it looks different than it did initially. It won’t be exactly the way we’d planned or thought of, but who’s to say something beautiful and perfect can’t come out of it?

Hopes and dreams are always out there, like clouds floating in the sky, changing and shifting. We need to slow down in life.

Remember that as we reach toward our dreams, we need to keep a grasp on the gifts we have – like family and good friends. Stop being involved in every single social event that knocks on our doors, following every other show on television, letting our time, talents, and dreams slide between our fingers.

We need to breathe. We need to remember that our goals and ideas should change a little, just like we do. As long as we don’t give up, our dreams are always a possibility.