The Maybe Man Dream
Wednesday night, I saw AJR perform live. It was an incredible performance! I could feel genuine love and passion coming from the stage into the crowd and vice versa. I'm thinking about trying to see them again when they come to Atlanta at the end of July because the show was that good. Plus, it would be interesting to see them again at the end of the tour (Wednesday was only the 4th or 5th night of the tour) to see how things changed.
For my blog post on December 27 of last year, I wrote out 12 dreams to focus on. Seeing AJR was a dream come true. Seeing it with friends was even better. And knowing that this tour was a dream come true for the band was the cherry on top. I love watching a dream come true while doing the same with mine.
This one was relatively simple to make happen. Any performance-based dream usually is. The biggest difficulty is often waiting for them to go on tour in the first place. Once that happens, we have to find a city near us or somewhere we can get to, buy tickets, and then figure out the logistics of that night.
For this dream, it meant driving to Charlotte (five hours away) to meet my sister and friends. I left my son behind with my husband, who was able to be home. I bought the tickets a few months back on a credit card that was later paid off. (I do feel like financials are an important context to add for anyone figuring out how to make something happen in their life. We can't duplicate other people's actions and hope to have their success if we don't have the whole story.) We stayed at a friend's house for the night, so there weren't any hotel fees or logistics to figure out.
Making a dream come true is all about setting ourselves up to take advantage of when the stars align. For some dreams, those stars come together quite often, and for others, it is a rare sight to see. No matter how long the journey or the difficulty level, a dream come true is a dream come true.
It's tempting to diminish the vastness of our accomplishments. Humans tend to remember the negative more than the positive and are quick to brush off success because it wasn't "enough" to justify the celebration. How often have we failed to celebrate a good grade on a test because we missed one question that we should have known? How often have we diminished our resiliency skills because we aren't facing a battle as big as our neighbors are? How often do we gloss over a great month in business simply because it wouldn't make the headlines in the local paper?
That's why I made that list in December. It's why I was intentional about writing each dream on a bottle of wine. I wanted to make sure I sat down and celebrated my dream come true even after the moment was over. We don't need to live in the past, but we also don't need to dismiss it so quickly. This logistically simple dream still puts another win under my belt. And I can use that track record of success to persevere through the obstacles that my new dreams will send my way.
I will share later about what stuck out to me from the concert, especially regarding chasing a dream. Anyone making it big in music has been fighting for that dream for a long time. I wanted to share that dreams are still coming true. Anyone in a rut can be reminded that dreams still come true. All day, every day, people watch dreams happen in their lives. It may have just been a regular Wednesday night for your family, but it was a dream come true for me.
We must hold on to that fact, no matter what anyone says. Everyone I've talked to this weekend has asked what concert I attended and followed it up with, "I don't think I know who that is." AJR has had a couple of songs go big on that radio, but I don't know that anyone my parents' age would necessarily know them. My dream isn't dependent on how recognizable it is, though. I can win and celebrate all by myself because I'm the one who made it happen. I also know that there were 9,000 people in the stadium with me, and Charlotte was not the only stop on this tour which has many sold out shows. I did not experience the only dream come true moment that night.
I don't care what your dream is because it is your dream. We have friends who just achieved a dream of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. Climbing a mountain will never make my list, but I can celebrate like crazy when they win because it's precisely where they want to be. Take ownership and pride in your dream, and then celebrate the heck out of it when you get there because it is not easy to make a dream come true. That moment is worth everything, and I hope you get one of those moments soon.