I have a dream.
All the greats said that.
I think dreams get a bad rap. They’re usually portrayed as wispy clouds in the sky, nothing you can hold onto, a thing to revere from a distance.
But don’t be fooled by the floating. If you examine a cloud closely, you’ll see that it is, quite surprisingly, holding a shit-ton of water.
Dreams, like clouds, carry more weight than you think. Dreams aren’t light and airy; they’re rich, full, and substantive. They’re everything.
And you’re not a fool for running toward one.
You! You’re also great, sitting there alone, with your focus and your beliefs and your fistful of seeds.
If you run, though it may seem silly, I promise you, you’ll become less and less skeptical that a wispy looking thing from the sky can do anything for you on the ground. You’ll start to feel the rustle of the roots underfoot, sharing their secret, reminiscing of the time before they became trees.
And as you run, you’ll notice that your dream is meeting you halfway. Your dream is coming to the earth, for you, that wispy thing. You arrive out of breath, hands on hips, and it places itself down before you, and you know what to do.
You, the believer. You, the next great thing. You reach your arms around your dream and squeeze, out of love, out of desperation, out of instinct. And the hidden gift comes out: droplets of the clearest, coldest water trickle down your arms, tickle you into aliveness as they fall off your elbows.
You’re so elated you almost forget about the seeds.
You can open your fists now, you’ve earned it. You’ve come all this way to kneel in the puddled soil, so far from the sky, to empty your hands, to take your place in line with the greats as you watch your dream, that wispy thing, spread and thin and become the air we breathe.
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Happy Martin Luther King Day. Be great. Run to your dreams.