A Houseboat with Amenities

When I was a kid, we took a trip out to Lake Powell to spend the weekend with my uncle and some of his friends on his houseboat. It was a blast. There was camping, swimming, speed-boating, jet-skiing, and rafting. I had such a great time that when we returned to our home in Colorado, I spent a few hours making a huge map based on our 20 acre property, including all of the fun things I had experienced that weekend, and some other stuff. It had a beach, river rapids, a natural water slide, rock-climbing wall, a lake, a houseboat (I even made a separate architectural draft of the houseboat and all of its amenities) and a sports complex complete with basketball, football, tennis and baseball. When the map was done I ran and showed it to my mom and she and I sat down and imagined together how we would spend our day.

The Home of my Dreams

Fast forward a few years and I would be sitting in class, completely zoned out in my own world, drawing plans for the house of my dreams. There were several different layouts, but almost all of them had a pool in the main living area.

Amphitheaters All Over the World

Fast forward a few more years and I would be playing and writing music with my friends and dreaming about how we would be selling out shows at amphitheaters all over the world and selling thousands, yes thousands, of albums.

Benland

Rewind to a time before all of this when I was a young kid living in California who loved amusement parks (what kid doesn’t?) and dreamed one day of designing and building his own. I remember sitting in the backseat of my babysitter’s car, sketching out a map of the different attractions and features, and sharing with excitement all of my big plans.

My babysitter, chuckling a little bit, said to me, “Building an amusement park is very, very expensive. You’ll probably never have the money to do something like that.”

I sat for a moment considering what she said, then I thought to myself, ‘I don’t believe you.’

The “Real World”

Today I live in the “real world” and I realize that I can’t just bring the ocean to Colorado and that all of the things I wanted to build there on our property would be extremely expensive and probably not a good investment. Today I don’t know how to design a house and it’s easier to believe that anything I might dream up would more likely sit there on paper than ever become a reality. Today I don’t really see myself playing to more than a room-full of friends and family, if I can manage to get out and play at all.

Today when I think back to the memory of my amusement park plans and what my babysitter said, I believe her. I don’t mean to villainize her… the real villain is this idea that when you dream impossible things, life, experience, reality stops us and tells us that things don’t really work that way. It’s the voice of reason. I have believed this voice for a while now.

Reason, the Friend and the Foe

Reason is not all bad. It’s kept me from making stupid decisions. It’s protected me from coming to financial ruin. It has allowed me to live a relatively safe life. But over the years I have allowed reason to steal my ability to dream big. I’ve traded my big, childish dreams for more reasonable, grown-up dreams.

Reality, the Accuser

When I reflect on my journey to this place of small, manageable dreams, I think about those moments when I allowed my dreams to be struck down by reality. Essentially reality stands pointing his finger and says, “Your dream is a lie.” In the moments where I had a choice to agree or disagree with this accusation, I looked at the evidence; the small, disengaged audience for which we were playing our music; my finances and my circumstanced; and I said, “reality… I think you’re right.”

When you feel hurt by someone or something you tend to not let it be in a position to hurt you again, and for this reason I have been holding my dreams at arms length for a long time. The consequence of this has been a reduction of passion and purpose in my mindset. My daily activity and the purpose with which I pursue dreams is in correlation with the size of my dreams. So I make allowances for all kinds of distractions, I skimp on the details, and I allow myself to be okay with “good enough.”

What if I Dream?

I don’t want to dream that way any more. What if I dream bigger again? What if in doing so I find renewed passion and purpose. What if my dream was so big and I believed in it so much that I could not be bothered with distractions and bad habits? Even if I dream big and fail big, wouldn’t the excitement and shift in my lifestyle and mindset be worth it? I think so.

I am challenging myself this week to dream big. Here are a few of the exercises I am going to try:

Dreaming Session

No details here, just writing down big dreams. And after having written them down, asking myself, ‘How can you dream even bigger than this?’

Sharing my Dreams with My Kids

If there’s an audience out there who will not immediately start telling my why my dreams may not work, it’s my kids. They’ll go along with whatever I say and may just add some valuable ideas to my dreaming process.

Interviewing my Kids

Fortunately “reason” has not set in yet with my children. I can ask them about their dreams and learn from their example.

Designing my House

In the spirit of dreaming big, I’ll do an “architectural draft” of the house of my dreams. I may or may not put a pool in the living room.

Share Your Dreams

Thanks for following along with me on this journey. If you have any thoughts or experiences of your own about dreaming big, please share them in the comments below. Comments geared toward trying to bring me back to reality will be deleted ;). Until next time, dream big. Now dream bigger.