What is your Big Dream?

What is your Big Dream?

I remember looking out the window while in grade school and being admonished by my teachers, “Quit daydreaming.” This was decades ago and yet I can still hear the tenor and tone of her voice as I sat shaking in my chair for I had been caught doing something wrong. I can still feel that flush of embarrassment as my cheeks grew hot and reddened as my classmates turned and looked at me. There I was the student who had the audacity to daydream.

I am no longer apologetic. The years have taught me the fallacy of chastising students for time spent daydreaming. For when we let go and spend a little time floating about in our own dreams it is then that we connect with our inner selves. It is then when we begin to imagine and ask the questions that lead us to look at what might be possible.

I hear people speak of New Years resolutions. So often the resolutions represent struggles we are currently encountering such as paying down a credit card balance, losing some weight or renovating a room in their home. So many people get mired down in the minutiae of living counting our successes and failures. A good day is one where they have lost a pound or found the perfect drapes.

Yet I am left to wonder: What is your big dream?

Too often we spend our time chasing the little things and never really spend our energy and gifts pursuing our big dreams. Some people have not indulged the notion of the big dream since they were children when we dreamed of being astronauts and exploring space, or hiking in the Amazon and studying the secrets of Peruvian shamans, or being the prima ballerina with the New York City Ballet. Without the big dream we can spend our entire lives following someone else’s idle minded agenda. Without the dream and the vision we can wander around lost in our own lives.

I spent decades trying to write my first book. I would get started and write and write and before long I was off on a tangent telling a story that was totally irrelevant to the theme of the book. I did not know how to get the story back on track. It wasn’t until a dear friend and mentor suggested that I write the beginning of the book and then write the last chapter. His sage advice, “You must know how the story is going to end if you are going to take the reader along on this journey.”

So I challenge you to begin this New Year do not begin this journey without any idea of where you want to go. Life is a time-limited gift. What do you want to do with this gift? What is your deepest heart felt desire? What have you been gifted with life to achieve and accomplish? I challenge you to dream big? This is not the time for excuses and enumerating the myriad of obstacles that might get in your way. The obstacles are nothing more than challenges and details to be worked out. The big dream is first. Begin this year with the glorious end in mind.

Jeanne Selander Miller is an international award-winning author of A Breath Away and A Million Miles from Home. She is the co-owner of Sisters Bistro in Old Forge, New York and spends the winters writing in Vero Beach Florida.