Dream Big, Always

“You are too old to plead infancy any longer”

-Homer, The Odyssey

If you don’t dream, no one else is going to dream for you. People will try to knock down your dreams and persuade you against them, but they are your own and only you can relinquish them.

When I was younger I always had my head in the clouds. No wait! I still do.

I wanted to be a musician and play lounge music and then I figured out that before that even happens, I have to learn how to play an instrument. I started with the guitar. After years of learning, my dream of playing in a band slightly subsided as I graduated college and began to truck my way up the career path and graduate school.

Author in Jam Session with @mylifeasadad Circa 1997

When I had some downtime, I would start to learn other instruments, bass, drums and piano. The opportunity to play in a band never materialized but I began to learn that music, (playing it), soothed my soul. Other activities can also perform the same action. I think that is what we all classify as something we “like”. No, not the hideous “like” from the numb skulls at Facebook but those activities that make us feel more like ourselves.

Who knows, perhaps sometime in life the opportunity will present itself and I’ll play in front of a grand stage, or maybe even a small one; it doesn’t make the pursuance of the dream any less as long as I keep it as my goal. Perseverance.

Same thing with writing. I used to think writing was something I did when I was bored in between classes in college. While people were huddled up with their fraternity brothers, I was in Montezuma Hall at San Diego State University eating by myself on a table with a journal and a head full of words that needed to come out. Was I ever going to publish them? Probably not, it was just something I liked to do.

Last week, I cleaned out my garage to prepare for the storage my 4 month year old daughter will eventually accumulate. I found a lot of my old binders from college and hidden in them was journals from college and grade school. It was like uncovering a treasure to my past!

In elementary school they used to make us write in our journals and our teacher promised us that nobody would read them. This was only for ourselves to help develop our writing skills. With that caveat in mind, I let my true self come out in my writing; eventually I started getting creative with it.

I laughed as I read my old journals. Stories of my first day of school and tales of what irked me as a child. I showed them to my wife and she said, “Oh my!  You were always a strange one.” I smiled because yes, I always was unique and proud of it.

Then she asked, “So how come your parents didn’t read this and talk to you about them or your teachers?” (as if someone should be concerned that the topics in my writings were a prelude to my looming madness), I told her it was because no one was supposed to look at them. Then she said, “But how do you know no one looked at them when you were at recces or lunch or maybe your mom saw it when you brought it home?” I became pensive and I didn’t have a retort. She is right. But at that point in my life I was naive to believe parents and teachers always said the truth.

Oh well, I don’t care if they read them then or not. All they would have been exposed to is pure literary entertainment of the first degree from my pre-adolescent mind.

So it seems that writing has been embedded as one of those features that also makes me happy.

I am a pretty simple man with simple needs. Books, music and a notepad to write about my transgressions in between waking and sleeping.

You want to be a game producer, a musician, poet, adventurer? Life is to short to allow adversity steer you away from your dreams.  Always keep pursuing your dreams, they make you who you are.

An entry in one of my school journals.