Follow your hopes and not your fears. – Unknown
Also similarly stated by Pope John XXIII as “Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams.” This is part of a larger quote: “Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.” This expanded version of the quote is what I will discuss in the post.
What does that mean?
It means that there is still hope. You can still do something. You can still follow your dreams. There is still some potential, still a chance. If you can turn away from your fears, learn from your failures (instead of dwelling on them) and move beyond your frustrations, you get something done. You can move towards your dreams, you can start doing what is possible and begin to reach your dreams.
Why is hope important?
Without hope, what do you have? By definition, you have hopelessness, right? I don’t even like the sound of that. Being a Cubs fan, I’m familiar with having my hopes dashed, my autumns plagued by the mocking of unfulfilled potential, and the weight of the failures. But there’s always next year. And I mean that, there is always next year.
Life can be a bit of a roller-coaster. It can be up one moment, then down the next. The trick, I have found, is to live neither in the memory of the up, nor in the memory of the down. To not be frustrated that you aren’t always at the top. To not dwell on the misery of the memory from the time when you were all the way at the bottom.
Hope, it is said, springs eternal. It is always welling up, always present. But that’s not true for everyone. It is natural to go through a “winter” phase, a time when all seems cold and bleak. But like winter gives way to spring, so too should your winter give way to spring, and with it, renewed hope. If it doesn’t, you may want to contact a professional for some assistance in getting things back on track.
Where can I apply this in my life?
Grab some paper and write down your hopes and dreams. Ignore your fears, just focus on your hopes and dreams. Where do you want to be in five or ten years? How do you want your circumstances to have changed? How would your life be different?
And now, wave your magic wand, and your dream will come true. No, not really. There will be a lot of thinking, planning and doing involved. There will also be failures, lessons and revisions.
We all have failures. Write them down – not all of them, just the ones applicable to the hopes and dreams you wrote down. Look at each failure. Can you learn a lesson? Perhaps you bit off too much, or needed some better skills. Whatever the failure was, learn a lesson from it, and plan a way to get around it. Write the lesson down and put a single line through the failure. Feel better now? I hope so.
We all have unfulfilled potential. We can do so much more than we usually make ourselves do. If it were impossible for you to be frustrated, what would you do? Write a few ideas down. Put together a quick plan for getting each of them done, perhaps five or six basic steps. Select one of the plans and make it more detailed. Now select the smallest task on the list and do it. Right now! I’ll wait, but time won’t. Is it done yet?
We are all dreamers, although some of us have fallen out of the habit of dreaming. A dream is the start of something great, if you can believe in your dream. Then all that is left is to put together a plan and get busy. Walt Disney turned a dream of a small amusement park for his employees and children into Disneyland, and 47 square miles of swampland in Florida into Disney World.
While Walt Disney may have been one of the greatest dreamers of our era, we can still dream our dreams, and work hard to make them happen. Like the song goes, “You’ve got to accentuate the positive, Eliminate the negative.” Don’t focus on the bad, focus on the good. Don’t focus on the past failures, focus on what you can still do. And always follow your hopes and dreams.
From: Twitter, @DavidRoads
confirmed at : Unknown – all over twitter; also a similar quote by Pope John XXIII at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/p/popejohnxx109443.html
Photo by Beau B
