Let me be cliché for a moment… what would you do today if you knew you couldn’t fail? I know, I know. We have all heard that saying before, some of us may even have a bumper sticker or t-shirt to remind other people that we, too, know that saying. But as a firm believer and fearer of the future, I ponder this idea more days than not.
At the age of six, your dreams of being an astronaut, a ballerina, a spy, or an undercover ballerina spy in space seemed too attainable. Around middle school, all the girls wanted to be models, actresses, or anyone famous. While the boys were obviously aspiring to be professional lacrosse or soccer players. Then high school rolled around and most of us seemed to not dream much anymore… the ballerina retired, the astronaut made his final voyage years ago, young girls were told they weren’t “pretty” or “skinny” enough, and the boys had been so worn down playing their sport that the love was lost somewhere among the excessive pressure put on them at such a young age.
Although these dreams seem as far and packed away as those boxes of scrunchies and baby Sperry’s, they are not as far as they seem. He still looks at the museum spaceships and pictures himself as the returning hero. She glances at her point shoes which are now merely a decoration in her room and she can almost feel the breeze that once whipped through her hair on stage. There was once a time that his best was good enough and he was truly in love with the game and she did feel pretty enough, she did feel worth something…
Age has a funny way of planting dreams in your heart and soul and then repossessing them like they were never really ours. If a dream were as attainable as they are portrayed in movies and books then they would be reality, once again leaving us with rotting imaginations and wasted space that once was home to hope and faith in the unbelievable.
So, yeah, maybe we are just a bunch of college kids thrown into a lifestyle that expects us to “buckle down” but “explore and make friends” while “making the parents proud” all while trying to “be true to yourself.” But in the end, the only person that doesn’t benefit from this “real world” people older than us love to welcome us too, is the six year old you who woke up every morning with a gleam in your eyes and a fire in your heart with the idea, that anything was possible. If that little kid knew then, what you knew now would you be able to look yourself in the eye and watch the dreams die? … then how could you let that happen now?
Sometimes all it takes is one of those hazy memories of the dreams that used to keep you up at night to remind you that it’s never too late to open your heart again, to dream, to do today absolutely anything, as if you knew you couldn’t fail.
