“Every great dream begins with a dreamer.  Always remember you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars and change the world,” Harriet Tubman (this was on my calendar and attributed to Tubman, I’m not sure on that).  We ended last week talking about the path we are meant to follow—and that all begins with a dream.  Trusting what we know about ourselves and being true to who we are all the time no matter what.   It isn’t easy being the one in the group to stand up and say something contrary to what the group believes—perhaps not even contrary, just a new line of thought. The point of a dream is to see something different and understand the possibility and potential to make that different a reality. Liz Gilbert talks about dreams finding us and how they will persist until they are realized.  She even relays the experience of having an idea for a novel that didn’t pan out for her and several years later, a fellow author of hers reached out and described an idea she had for a book—and it was the same book that Liz had been working on and ultimately abandoned.  The idea found home in another person.  All of that is to say that all change, all potential begins with a dream.  A single thought is all it takes.  Some statistic states we repeat something like 90% of the same thoughts we had the previous day—so if we want to effect change, first we must examine our thoughts. 

The path we are given isn’t mean to be easy—it is for a purpose and with purpose comes lessons we must learn, and as the dreamer, we must be cognizant and vigilant of what the purpose is.  We’ve been told that ease is what we should look for and we often equate comfort to ease. The path we are meant to walk will always require work, and that work isn’t necessarily easy, but it is simple and we can find purpose and joy in it. Those lessons show us options as we see other possibilities.  That isn’t to say life presents constant obstacles or challenges for us, rather they are specific obstacles.  We are meant to face those things and learn to function at our best in the face of whatever may come our way.  This is to say the birth of anything isn’t easy—it is fraught with pain we’ve never felt before but the result is something more beautiful than we can imagine.  Change is birth—it is the welcoming of something new and we can never go back to how things were—change is the ultimate before and after, the divide of who we are now and what we were before.  The shedding is letting go of what we new so we can grow and welcome what we become. Anything that comes on the path is worth it in the end.