The Importance of Goals and Dreams

Much of what I have learned from this week’s studies has helped me to realize that the future is not as scary as I once thought.

Not AS scary, anyway.

There are still many unknowns, and the unknown is always scary. However, it was a comfort to see all the random thoughts floating around in my head about my future prospects coalesce into a semblance of a plan as I wrote them down. More ideas even occurred to me as I wrote down the ones I already had.

Two of the more important things I learned this week were to trust God, and to have a dream or goal in mind. When we trust God and put our lives I His hands, we can be guided, as long as we follow His commandments. We more readily receive inspiration from Him when the spiritual “communication lines” are free of the clutter of sin and disobedience.

However, almost as important is that we have a direction to go. We cannot be guided if we are not taking steps toward a goal, or in pursuit of our dreams.

I believe it is incredibly important to dream. When you don’t have a dream, you tend to wander aimlessly when considering where to go. When you have no dream or no goal in life, the question of where to go turns out very much like this conversation between Alice and the Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland:

          "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
          "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."
          "I don't much care where –"
          "Then it doesn't matter which way you go.”
          (Quote found on Goodreads.)

In his “last lecture”, Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, describes how he was able to achieve a lot of his life goals. One of the main reasons he was able to achieve his goals was that he was encouraged to be engaged in the pursuit of his dreams while growing up. His creativity was not stifled---and additionally, he did not take failure as a reason to give up. He persevered until he found a solution, or chalked the failure up to experience and used it to achieve other goals.

One of my lifelong goals (not related to any of what Randy Pausch called the “more important things”, aka Family) has been to write and publish a novel. I believe that this is certainly within my abilities and is actually very likely to happen. I love art, and unless something major comes up, I will be sticking to that as my career. I do, however, have a love of the written word, and crafting images through words. I already have an aptitude and love of the craft, and study it frequently.

My biggest obstacle is making the time to do it. I have an idea to combine it with my artistic talents, however, and a pet idea of mine would be to create an illustrated novel. It used to be that books always had art in them, but now it is viewed as juvenile. Now, given my art style, I think that my novel would very likely be targeted at young adults, but I believe that it can still be a mature (yet clean) story. It is a goal and a dream I intend to see fulfilled.