Why Our Maturity Needs Our Dreams

Whatever other regrets you decide to lay at the feet of your deepening maturity, promise yourself you will never blame it for killing your dreams.

Dream killing is way outside its job description. Besides, your aging just doesn’t have time for such things.

If you’re more of the mind to (respectfully) ask for a little help  – a little nurturing – with some of those dreams, however, Aging is your “man”  . . so to speak.

Dreams? “What DREAMS?”, you ask.

Time out . . . . . You know the ones I mean. I’m talking about the dreams you’ve been keeping under your pillow all these years.

Shhhh. I know. You’ve been feeding them just about forever, right? Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.

These dreams are pure energy. They’re part of YOUR pure energy . . the purest you ever had . . from back before you learned to judge them – and yourself for having them . . back when you weren’t afraid to hold them up to the light and let rainbows dance on them . . back when they fed your imagination with ‘some days‘ and ‘when I grow ups‘ and ‘I can hardly wait tills‘.

These are the dreams you once relied on to keep you safe when it felt like the world around you was a scary place.

They made you smile when nothing else could.

And I bet they made you smile even more to feel that you – and you alone – understood their magic.

Your dreams expanded your universe.

Pure energy. Pure connection. Pure source.

We All Grow Up, and What of Dreams?

Then you grew up and slipped them under your pillow. And one by one, you forgot the dreams were there.

It’s okay. It happens. That’s how we were made.

For some strange reason, we are taught that after a certain time in life we don’t need our dreams. We are taught that we have to stand on our own. After all, people (who’ve forgotten their own dreams) tend to look down on dreamers.

This world runs on productivity, not make-believe. Not dreams.

How sad for you and me. How sad for all of us.

But you see, your dreams never really went away. They never disappeared.

Growing up didn’t kill your dreams. Neither did growing older, which is very good because the older we get, the more important our dreams become.

Actually, they’ve been showing up in your night-time dreaming all along . . just checking in with you when you’re not really aware, to see if you’re starting to open up to all they’ve been holding for you.

So, peek under your pillow. Go ahead.

Time out. You’ll never see them if you look with aging adult reality eyes.

Now look again, through the same eyes that gently put those dreams under there in the first place.

That’s better.

What do you see? How many do you remember?

That’s right. Go ahead and get reacquainted. They’re as happy to see you as you are to finally be reaching back for them.

Our dreams are so very important – whatever our age.

That’s why they come first to children . . Children . . whose lives run as much on the open wonder of  imagination as they do on grown-up definitions of reality. (Actually, more on wonder. Definitely more.)

When we were children, we gave birth to whole worlds of dreams. Awww, what splendid canvases we painted . . fingers, toes, all the rest! The more the imaginative wonder, the more we dreamed. The more dreams we held, the greater our life’s potential creativity.

It’s an amazingly intricate pattern, actually. Kind of like life.

Then again: What splendid canvases we painted before we learned to reject dreaming so we could better fit into adulthood.

We did make ourselves fit, didn’t we – most of us? And that’s not all bad, as long as we avoided doing it completely.

Heaven forbid we never go back to look under the pillow!

Someday Is Here.

You’re All Grown Up.

The time you could hardly wait for is NOW!

The way I see it, the saddest thing in the world is to go the whole way through life’s second half without our dreams . . without giving ourselves a chance to re-discover . . re-imagine . . and re-create what our childhood dreams were trying to teach us . . without having the opportunity to attach all we’ve learned through the years to those dreams . . giving them new life and helping them come true in the real world – our real world – as only we can.

Dreams feed the soul. We need them as much as they need us.

And the world needs us to remember them, because there are a lot of problems that are going to take some serious dreaming to fix.

I believe people only get old when they lose their dreams. They forget where they put them. They move so many times through life, that one of those times their pillow gets left behind. (Someone else might find it, but the dreams won’t fit. Dreams are highly personal, you know.)

So, it’s terribly important to keep our dreams alive. It’s even more important to feed our dreams, and to give them what they need so they can grow. The world – and our own sanity – are depending on us.

Time out again: Yes, I did say “grow”. Dreams grow just as we do, except better, because they don’t get all bogged down in our tired old assumptions about reality and what’s really possible.

Like I said before, dreams are pure energy.

And what that means is that the dreams you most loved as a child are the dreams with the best potential to inspire you now. The only difference between then and now is the knowledge you now have to turn those dreams into something more.

All it took was a little aging.

So why are we waiting? Dreaming doesn’t wait. It keeps right on dreaming.

We have the maturity.

We have the dreams.

Let’s get started. Now.

Tell me: What are you going to do with your dreams? How are you going to make them come true, now that you know you can?

Share your dreams. Share your stories.

Keep growing my friend,

Gail

Tagged as: Aging, dreams, growing older, life's second half, maturity, Old, regrets