What Dreams Ultimately Do: Smolder Inside Us Until We Take Action to Make Our Dream our Reality
Viola Davis, the fabulous award-winning actress spoke about achieving dreams. She said:
“That’s what dreams ultimately do: drive us to want and need something better.”
“That’s what dreams ultimately do: drive us to want and need something better.”
The Harlem Village Academies is a network of charter public schools in Harlem that are nationally recognized for academic excellence. It’s based on 1 core idea:
Belief in the power of teachers. The teachers are coached weekly on how to make lessons more challenging and interesting for the kids with the freedom to run their classrooms. That produces passion and dedication, and in the end the Academies held their teachers accountable for results.
Deborah Kenny, CEO of the Harlem Village Academy says “There is not equality in America, and I think about it constantly. We have 14 million children living in poverty, and there is a complete disparity between the education they receive and that of a child in a high socioeconomic bracket. But we’ve learned many lessons over the years and are now figuring out how to share that knowledge with educators around the country. That’s a critical first step to solving the education problem nationally.”
It’s so important that we teach our children that they are wise and capable. That we take the time to support their goals and dreams and let them know if they choose to pursue a dream and will take the necessary action steps to achieve it, they can make their dreams come true. Often times the outcome is beyond their wildest dreams.
You’ve heard of Abby Sunderland, the 16 year old Southern California girl who set out to go 25,000 miles and circle the globe alone in a sailboat. She was lost at sea for a period of time in an almost fateful journey, and thankfully returned home safely.
Jean Pierre Arabonis, A South African Oceanographer and meteorologist whose company OSIS advises the shipping industry on navigating safe passage around dangerous weather, said he admired Sunderland’s effort. He described the place where she’d run into trouble as “one of the nastiest pieces of ocean you can encounter,” with reported wind speeds as high as 115 MPH. Arabonis commends Sunderland on having sailed 12,000 miles before running afoul of the weather, and added that in his opinion, there was nothing she could have done to avoid having her boat’s mast cracked by a rogue wave. The vessel experienced a mechanical failure; it had nothing to do with her age.
When reporters asked her father, Laurence, about her journey and the ocean, he said:
“What do I think of the ocean? The ocean scares me and that’s a healthy sort of fear.” Laurence added that the rewards of Abby’s sailing expedition trumped the risks. “Frankly life is unsafe,” he said, “Life has a 100 percent mortality rate. We’re all going to die, you know? I think the saddest things about living, is getting to a ripe old age and never having fulfilled a dream in your life.”
In the year 2010 alone:
· a 13 year old American boy summated Mount Everest,
· a 15-year old skied to the North Pole,
· a 16-year old British boy completed the Marathon des Sables, a grueling 151-mile race across the Sahara,
· and Jessica Watson sailed triumphantly into Sydney Harbor after 7-months alone at sea.
An old Iranian proverb goes: Fire is smoldering beneath the ashes.
What fire is smoldering within you? Are you ready to take steps to start fulfilling your dream?
