Dreams are an important part of life, and yours are not out of reach
Ceilidh Adams
Opinion Editor
“If your dreams don’t scare you, they are not big enough”- Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
We all have dreams. Dreams of what we want to do, and who we want to be. Some of us long for big cities, the thrill of the bustle excites us; while for others, the suburbs provide a sense of peace and family. Some of us want to be teachers, some doctors, and some of us, young and old, still have no idea what we want to do with the rest of our lives.
Regardless, it is fair to say that we all dream of bigger things for our lives. The real question here, though, is, how do we get there? How do we become the people that we strive to become?
The two and most important aspects of dreams is to work and passion. Dreams require effort. Accomplishing dreams requires tears, failure, energy, accomplishments, worries, but most importantly, work, and passion. Dreams require this kind of absolute love for this dream, and this passion is what drives us to accomplish our most daring dreams.
What is something that drives you to get up and out of bed every morning? It can be something as simple as not wanting to bus tables for the rest of your life, or something as big as needing to fulfill your lifelong dream. These are the passions that drive us.
So when you’re in the library studying for that final, and you feel like screaming and throwing something, (first of all, take a deep breath, we’ve all been there), but think about your dreams. What are your passions? Imagine that person you want to become. This is impossible without a little (or a lot) of hope and lots and lots of hard work and effort. And even the occasional emotional breakdown too.
Setting goals for yourself, big and small, is something that you can do to create a staircase to that wonderful dream of yours. Some of us create dream boards, we take pictures from the Internet of the things we want in our lives and we put it on a board, so that when we are feeling down and unmotivated, we can remind ourselves of these wonderful dreams.
While others write down these goals. Sometimes, creating this staircase to your dreams can start with this process. Write down smaller goals for yourself; for the day, for the week, for the semester, and even for the year. Through writing down these goals, you can accomplish these smaller feats that will bring you to your larger goal.
Similarly, tell your friends what your goals are. This way, when you are all hanging out in the library and you are feeling frustrated and lost, your friends can remind you of these amazing dreams. This is also useful if you are feeling unmotivated; your friends can now tell you to stop being lazy, because you have to write that paper in order to get an A in your Linguistics class so that you can pass the class so that you can graduate on time so that you can eventually be an English teacher and live in the suburbs in the South and live happily ever after. You know, in the hypothetical situation like that.
Another aspect of dreams is that they can change. Life happens, events happen in your life and this can send you on a path that you never expected. When this happens, embrace it. Life can be spontaneous, and dreams can change; what matters in the end is that you are still dreaming.
Dreams can be big and small, and range from person to person, but they are at the end of the day something that can give us hope and can motivate us to be the best people that we can be.
So dream. Dream of the best things. Build that staircase to your goals by simply setting goals for yourself and then ticking them off, one by one.
“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them”- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Ceilidh Adams is the Opinion Editor for The Comment. Email her at c3adams@student.bridgew.edu
