Hearts and Dreams

Believing in your dreams may sound like something you might hear coming from the mouth of a Disney princess, but it’s not all fairytales and foreseeing the future. I do not believe that dreams show you what’s in the future or let you see into other people’s minds or anything along those lines. Sometimes events in my dreams inspire or motivate me to do things in real life, like standing up to someone who’s been being an ass, or finally talking to the cute guy who started working at the same place as me. However, I know that not all dreams have true meaning and sometimes they are just random thoughts that have been pushing through my subconscious recently. I don’t always think these things through, although if I dream about something and then decide to do it, that takes some thinking through. Sometimes I just forget the consequences and the stakes and I just do it. I let my heart lead me.

Realists say that leading with your heart is stupid and unreasonable; they say that leading with your head and playing it safe will get you farther in life. But if you play it safe, never giving that cute guy from the grocery store a call, always faking sick when your friend sets you up on a blind date, refusing to ever love or fool around, and only focusing on school and work, then yes, forty years from now you might end up with a successful job or a nice apartment or a lot of money. But all of that means nothing if you don’t have someone to come home to. It means nothing if you don’t have anyone to celebrate your new promotion with, or complain about your boss to, or just relax and have fun with. Maybe you have lots of friends, but chances are, forty years from now they will all have spouses and kids and maybe even a big dog named Rover. If you lead with your head and not your heart, then one day you’ll wish you had. You’ll wish you had taken a chance on that cute guy from your Biology class, or that you’d ended up going on that blind date instead of faking sick, or that you’d told your secret crush that you’d liked him. You’ll wish that you hadn’t spent your life sitting on the sidelines because you didn’t want to get dirty, watching the players scoring goals and having fun and yes, sliding in the mud along the way. Well I certainly don’t want to spend my life waiting on the sidelines; I want to jump right into the field and not care if I get dirty. I don’t want to be sitting forty years from now, alone in an expensive, empty house and wondering “what if…” Life is just a field and you need to jump right in the game if you want to truly live. Sitting on the sidelines, cheering on your friends, it’s truly no way to live. So listen to your heart and run onto that field before it’s too late. Don’t listen to your head, which is telling you that you might get dirty or you could hurt yourself.