Follow Your Dreams?

    For too much of my life I have allowed my dreams to be rerouted by others. Dreams, plans, schemes, wishes, what I want to be when I grow up. I do manage to find my way to fulfilling many of my hopes and aspirations despite often feeling railroaded into the dreams of others. A large part of my Nature is that I like making people happy. I enjoy making life happy for those I love, through things both small and large. There is a deep satisfaction to helping someone realize their potential, or find thier bliss. The flipside of this is that I often put my own dreams on the backburner while helping another attempt to find their path. This is problematic on too many levels. The biggest crime is that I often place my needs and desires secondary, and delude myself that their path is my path. The truth is that we cannot, and should not walk another's path, or try to lead them along our own path. I know that it would be ideal to find that soulmate who is walking the same, or parallel path, a companion to lessen that lonely void in the night. But solitude is preferable to being pulled away from your dreams.
    I allowed myself to be distracted from my dreams long enough that some of them became unobtainable. Instead of bemoaning my fate, I have chosen to strive for those dreams that are still possible, and realign my thinking about those that aren't. Just because some dreams have slipped from my fingers does not mean that I cannot rethink my future, find an alternate path, new Dreams.
    A hard lesson learned is how the pursuit of a dream can descend into a nighmare-like abyss. I have had to make hard choices that were as painful as severing a limb. Choices, that at the times threatened to break me into brittle shards. Days would pass when I would question my ability to stay focused and on track, question my own sanity. Doubts and fears would assail my every moment. Darkness seemed to shroud my every choice, my every move seemed destined to fail, cursed. The nightmare seemed endless, my constant companion for the better part of a year. Panic, terror, abject loneliness, desperation and failure were my bedfellows. When you know the hard choices that must be made, and can see with clarity where those choices will force your life, but knowingly move forward with eyes affixed to the goal despite violent opposing forces. That is the true pursuit of a Dream. To find the strength within your soul to move ahead despite the foreknowledge of the pain and trauma you will suffer en route. To keep struggling to put one foot in front of the other, against the odds, against the tide, pushing upstream. To fight, struggle, weep, bleed, pay the ferryman. To rise above one's own doubts and fears. To face the fire, be seared and blistered, but continue through the flames. This is my truth. This is my struggle. To fight and win, risk and reward, bleed and heal. When the Dream becomes tangible, solid, real, then it is truely mine. The reward is all the sweeter for the pain and risk involved.
    A strictually spiritual victory is won with a hard-fought battle. There is far more potential for spiritual damage in pursuit of dreams. To throw yourself, body and soul, into a quest is to risk your heart, mind and spirit. To open your heart, bare your soul, is truely to risk all. The fear of that deep a risk is what often turns many people away from reaching for their dreams. But I have discovered that to risk it all, to fail, to fall, to feel that heart-wrenching agony, is not the end of the world, though it may feel so at the time. Instead what I found, to my surprise, is that even with the possibility of abject failure, the risk itself can be worth the effort. All out risk can become an epic failure. But even the failure can lead to a victory, when you come back stronger and more determined than before. When the pain of failure passes it leaves behind the knowledge that the victory is in the battle itself sometimes, not the outcome. Spiritually and emotionally I risked it all, failed, and am eager to risk it again. The exhiliration of the risk, the adrenaline of battle, the red hot energy of the pursuit, is a dream unto itself, regardless of the outcome. I believe I may have developed an addiction to risk, become an spiritual adrenaline junkie.
    And so I have learned to follow my Dreams. I have had major success through sheer force of will. I have had abject faliure that merely whetted my appetite. I do not need to curtail my wild imagination ever again. I may try and fail. But I tried. And failure will show me an alternate route, and add to my strength. I may win through the fire and wrap my hands around my reality.  I am already in hot pursuit of the next group of Dreams.