What You Don’t Dream Today, You Never Reach Tomorrow
Our family’s new read-aloud is Mother of Learning, a progressive fantasy series about a boy stuck in a time loop. Somewhere in its pages, this line came to me:
“What you don’t dream today, you never reach tomorrow.”
I’ve been reading a lot this week, before school, after practice, in the gaps. It’s State week for cross country. Alongside the fantasy, I’m reading Believe in Her: Why Girls Need Confidence and How to Cultivate It for my daughter. In these days before her race, I’ve been trying to help her see that running her best isn’t defined by what happens on Saturday. It’s what has unfolded over three years of growing, as a person and as an athlete.
That’s the space the line came from.
Fear, expectations, and the dream
Most of us let our dreams get overridden by fear and by expectations. When we dream, all of that goes aside, at least for a moment.
That’s what I wanted for the Siṃhī series: a world where myth, sacred text, a tradition of wisdom, and learning Sanskrit help us live a better life today, not someday.
You might think celebrating the process and dreaming big pull against each other. I think it’s the best kind of tension. A race, or anything we really give ourselves to, is a quest. We hold a vision, we commit, and we carry it out. That is very different from meeting anyone’s expectations of you.
Expectations come loaded with other people’s projections: their own successes and failures, their ideas of what will keep you safe, set you apart, or give you status. But the part of you that dreams is special. So is the part of you that does the work. Both need a seat at the table if you’re going to do things that surprise yourself.
Dreaming breaks the mold
Dreaming is a gift. Without it, no one would have broken the four-minute mile or landed on the moon. Dreaming is what pulls us out of how things are and opens up what could be.
So I dare you to dream, and to dream big. It may be the most underused resource there is, and it’s free and already inside you. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never been the most talented one in the room. A dream is the seed of everything that has ever been.
First the dream. Then what follows: hope, happiness, and the joy of both today and tomorrow.
What you don’t dream today, you never reach tomorrow.