To Catch A Dream
I fully stand behind the idea that all of the world's secrets are hidden in books. And they can be found anywhere within those books. Fiction books open us up to learning through our imagination. Some of the most profound quotes that live rent free in my head, come from the books that were designed to teach very little. Nonfiction teaches us through information. Both are important ways to learn, and I think the most important thing when it comes to books is that we read them in whatever way is best for us to process that information.
We’ve made a concerted effort recently to read more to our son. He’s behind when it comes to speaking (at least by Georgia standards which I heard many people disagree with) so we were encouraged to incorporate more reading and more words into his life. We primarily do this at bedtime when he has his milk so that he is more inclined to sit still and listen. The more I read children’s books, the more I see the lessons that we need to be reminded of everyday.
I have a book entitled “How to Talk to Bears,” that I got from my grandmother. She was an elementary teacher and you can still see the school property stamp at the front of the book. It is a collection of short stories and the one that stuck out to me last night is called “To Catch a Fish” by Eloise Greenfield. It goes:
“It takes more than a wish
To catch a fish
You take the hook
You add the bait
You concentrate
And then you wait
You wait you wait
But not a bite
The fish don't have an appetite
So tell them what
Good bait you've got
And how your bait
Can hit the spot
This works a whole
Lot better than
A wish
If you really
Want to catch
A fish”
It takes a lot more than thinking about a dream to see it come true. Thinking about it it’s important, but it is our thinking that influences our actions. It takes more than a wish to catch our dreams. That’s why they are dreams. We aren’t casting a wish out into the sky hoping that something falls from the heavens. We are plotting and planning to make these desires come true.
Making our plans is a lot like fishing, especially when we focus on the basics. We have the bait and the hook. We pack sunscreen and something to sit on. We bring snacks and a drink. Most importantly we bring a cooler to store our catch. We do all this preparation because we know it is a recipe for success. The one factor that we cannot control is the amount of time that we have to do the basics before we see our dream come true.
It is going to be different for everyone. Some of us will get a bite right off the bat while others will have to come back for weeks on end to catch something. Some of us will get a lot of nibbles before we ever get the bite we are looking for. But we keep doing these things, no matter how long it is taking, because we know they work.
We need to take the same approach to our dreams. Now, obviously not all of us are in love with fishing for a variety of reasons. Being outside is not my cup of tea and open water is not my favorite thing either, so fishing isn’t my go to activity. But I know a lot of people dislike it because of how much waiting it involves.
Unfortunately, almost everything in life requires waiting with the frustrating middle ground where it feels like things are not improving. We have a spike of activity and excitement in the beginning when everything is new, and we improve quickly. Going from skill a to b is often a lot easier than going from b to c. Then we have the dreaded middle area where our skills are improving at a snail speed and our results are showing up even slower than that. In the book, “The Dream Giver” this area is called the wasteland.
We enter the wasteland when we’ve left behind all the comfort and familiarity of our lives, and yet we still find ourselves so far from our dreams. We look around and feel like we are making little progress. Like in a desert it is hard to tell how much further we have to go, but we also can’t see how far the beginning is from us either. It is during this time that we face the bigger enemies of our own self-doubt and internal challenges rather than the external forces that we will meet along the way.
Waiting sucks. It is boring and painful, but there’s two positives to this. For one, we are waiting for our dreams rather than waiting for them to call our ticket number at the DMV. It is certainly way more tolerable to wait for the things we are excited about over the things we have to do. I, for one, know many people willing to stand in line for over an hour to ride a rollercoaster that will last three minutes. Waiting for our dream feels like a worthy cause.
Secondly, waiting is a verb. It is an action that we are taking that does get us one step closer to our dreams. When we talk about waiting for our dreams, we aren’t talking about sitting quietly at a bus stop waiting for the right vehicle to arrive. We are waiting like we do in fishing with all the tools in hand, repeating the same action of casting, reeling, and sitting over and over again until we see the results we need.
If we can treat doing the basics of our dreams with the same consistency, persistence, and passion that people fish with, then I think we will find the journey much more enjoyable. After all, it’s a requirement for our dreams, so why on earth would we not figure out how to wait with all our hearts?