“Make believe and fantasy only find truth
in an imaginative heart and an open mind.”

Often I save scraps of unfinished thoughts for future inspiration. Frequently they end up forgotten taking up space on my hard drive. While looking through a file of remnants this morning I came across the fifteen words above. What seemed incomplete when saved appears now a surprisingly finished and meaningful thought. Maybe time was needed to forget the original context the concept came from so I could forget enough to see the notion’s broader meaning.

A discovery of the last couple of years is how important daydreaming is. The habit to intellectually sneer at thoughts conjured within fantasizing is not gone. Such rational disbelief is taught and engrained in us all. We’re told “be realistic”, “you’re dreaming”, “get in the real world” and such. Today it is my open acceptance that anything beyond who I presently am, what I know and have already accomplished resides in the dominion of wishing and dreaming. Those realms are not found in the “real world” so often we’re reminded to live within.

For “make believe and fantasy” to find any rational meaning and have a chance of coming true they must come to an “imaginative heart and an open mind”. That’s the way many great insights or discoveries came to be. From trying an approach someone was almost completely convinced could not work was a break through made.

There is no doubt the world has millions of ‘dreams’ kept secret or given only lip service. Making aspirations, grand or more humble, come true takes effort and toil that only imagination can make bearable. There lives the blindness to logic that is so often the robber of our “castles in the sky”.

One of my mentors in absence has been Henry David Thoreau who wrote, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” That shall not be me! The longer I live the more prolific my hopes and dreams become and the more committed I am to pursuing them. No longer do I fear failure that much, for it matters very little.

My most meaningful reward is not accomplishment, but within pursuit of my fantasies and daydreams. To know I tried; to know I went for it will have me more apt on my deathbed to say “I had a good life. I lived well” instead of being filled with regret and “shoulda, coulda”. What an amazing piece of wisdom to have resonating with me. From whatever source it came, I am humbly grateful.

If there were ever a time to dare,
To make a difference
To embark on something worth doing
It is now.
Not for any grand cause, necessarily –
But for something that tugs at your heart
Something that is worth your aspiration
Something that is your dream.
You owe it to yourself
To make your days count.
There is only one you
And you will pass this way but once.
From the poem “Dream Big” – Author Unknown