"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams"
Eleanor Roosevelt
Of all the billions of people in the world, probably every single person has a dream, if not scores of them. Is there even a figure for the number of dreams being dreamed at this moment? Dreams that haven’t come true yet, but many of which will, one day. That’s a lot of creative energy in action right now.
We can’t even see that it’s having any impact on the material world at this phase. Not one of us billions knows for sure that our dreams are in the process of coming true. We can't see it; our senses aren’t finely tuned enough. It only becomes obvious when it crosses that line between the reality of idea and physical reality. At the point of dreaming all we’ve got to rely on is our audacious capacity of faith, belief, hope.
Turning dreams into reality is laborious and challenging. Dreams are a quick thing but the material world is clumsy, especially at the beginning. In that phase, when all you’re getting is no or no response at all, it’s easy to get discouraged, and to believe that you’re not good enough in whatever you’re doing. Life and people and God and Universe won’t reward me because I don’t deserve it.
Of course that innate belief cauterizes your success, it shuts you down, it stops you from going forward. In those times when you so desperately want some kind of affirmation from the world, sometimes the only thing you can do is remember that nobody ever knew when they started out that they would succeed.
It’s dangerous to predict your future by what’s happened in the past, or even what’s happening in the present, unless you can see it from this perspective: every time I’ve stumbled or been rejected or not supported in the way I longed for woke me up a bit more to how little I believed I deserved any of the good things in life. Each time I did as much as I could to repair.
And I didn’t give up. Repair is incremental. All my stumbling, all my groping in the dark, all my failures to get any kind of meaningful traction in the material world haven’t been failures at all. They’ve actually been about an accumulation of understanding and wisdom about myself and life and people and God and the Universe.
Every time it seems that life is knocking me down down and I get up again, every time I feel lousy about myself and I reach out for love and protection my entitlement and self esteem and my core belief in myself grow stronger. I begin to behave differently towards myself and in the world. I'm more protective, less adaptive, less apologetic. All of which amounts to a sure and steady movement towards the fulfillment of dreams.
This has been my experience of life and it's the story of empowerment in individuals and in societies the world over. Minorities and the suppressed long for freedom and the experience of flourishing and being treated with respect. They stumble and fall, stumble and fall, butting their minds and bodies against the seemingly unbreachable and materially very real walls of fear and prejudice of those in power.
And the disbelief within themeselves that they deserve. Gradually the wall is eroded and their self belief is strengthened. Dreams are powerful. Do whatever you need to do to hold onto the ones that give your life prospect, because that's what gives you the energy and strength to carry on. One day, the dream starts to be materially visible, like a shoot poking its head up above the ground.
What if our destiny is for our dreams to come true, and it’s already happening, and nothing can stop it?
