Keeping the Dream Alive

I have been working on this for two weeks trying to get past my mental block. I wanted to write about how important it is for teachers to help children identify their dreams and nurture them. I wanted to say that the dreams should be realistic, but people need them. I believe I am equating dreams with hope. If you don't have a dream, how can you have hope? If you don't have hope, how can you have life at least a life that is worth living.

The reason I am having such a hard time getting past even the first sentence is that this has not been a good time for me. It's not so much that my personal life is falling apart. I'm used to that (the part that has to do with my own personal self not my family life or my spiritual life). I have been trying for years to get a job, and I can't because of my handicap and its unusual impositions on my life. I have just encountered so many people who are embittered by life, and I can't help but wonder if that is the result of the world losing hope. Perhaps that is the real reason for the events of September 11, 2001. Maybe those involved had no hope for a better future, certainly not on this planet, so they left this place and, in doing so, left behind more of the misery that drove them to such an act in the first place.

I was talking with some high school classes the other day, and that experience summed up so much of what I am feeling. Many of them feel there is no hope. They believe the best they can do is get out there and just do the best they can to survive. Few of them have long term goals and dreams. Their heads aren't in the clouds. When I was 17 and graduating high school, I was so unrealistic... full of plots and plans and schemes. I wanted to do this and do that. I was preparing for some wonderful life. Ultimately, little of it came true, but what did happen was, in many ways, just as good. I never lost sight of my dreams or the need for a dream.

Even now, it is my dreams which keep me going. Regardless of how sad and discouraged I am, I just keep sight of the fact that while I may have to adjust my path, my dreams are intact as long as I choose for them to be. As long as I don't give up, I am not failing. I always say that I have never failed at anything even though I realize there are a lot of things that have not been successes in my life. I figure as long as I haven't quit, I still haven't failed.

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