Thank you, Aristotle

"Hope is a waking dream..."- Aristotle

I had a conversation the other night about teenagers and dreaming. A converstaion about how one of the indredible things about teenagers is their ability to have dreams about how life might turn out. That at their age and innocence they still have hope that whatever they imagine life will be like, might actually come to be.

We had the conversation in the context, that as adults, some of us have lost our ability to have dreams. To have hope. To believe that what we want, what we desire, can actually be. I find this to be very true, and very sad.

Life never really turns out the way you imagine it would at sixteen. Some dreams don't come true. Some things aren't achieved. Some dreams you lose hold of slowly, like sand slipping out your hand so slightly that you never notice the lack of it until its completely gone. Some dreams shift, they change or fade away. Other dreams can get lost or ripped away in a moment. But you still feel each loss. And when we lose dreams, there is a grief. A hurt. Its like a part of ourselves has left.

And since it hurts, I think that we stop dreaming. Because life is hard enough, has enough stress and worry without inflicting this hurt upon ourselves. But I think that when we do this, we in effect, lose our ability to hope as well.

I love Aristotle's quote, "Hope is a waking dream." Because, in essence, what are dreams but hope of what we want life to turn out to be. And hope is the conscious factor of these dreams. So when we lose our ability to dream, to imagine, to conjure, we lose our ability to hope.

I know that every time I dream, there is the possibility that that dream won't turn out. Every time I imagine what could be, I know that it isn't what will be. I realize that every time I hold hope for a situation in my heart, there is a distinct reality that that hope will never be fulfilled.

And sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it hurts so much all we can do is become numb.

But I think the numbness, I think the lack of dreaming, I think the absence of hope- that is far worse. That losing our ability to hope and dream does far more damage to our soul.

Is it hard to relearn how to hope and dream like we did when we were fifteen? Absolutely. And I don't think the point is to go back to that type of dreaming completely. I think we need to dream adult dreams- dreams that are full of the hope we can feel despite the fact we know that life always isn't picture perfect or easy. Dreams that will occur with the knowledge that they might actually never be. And I think it takes far more courage and guts to dream this way.

But just because something is hard, doesn't mean its not worth it. I think that to relearn how to dream, how to have hope, I believe those are worth the effort they take.