Inspiration For the Week: Moving In the Direction of Your Dreams

A quote that keeps coming to mind, from Walden Pond, by Henry David Thoreau:

"...if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the licence of a higher order of beings."

Last month my family made that leap - the confident leap in the direction of our dreams. We are going to Taiwan this year for 3 months! WA-HOOOOOO! This dream has been years and years in coming. Though MOST of the details of our trip we DON'T know, there IS something so miraculously liberating about saying, "Enough with all the what-abouts. Maybe we'll never have ALL the right answers. But we won't be stopped from living the life we have imagined."

As we have taken this first step towards our dreams, we've found new energy and enthusiasm for everything. We've found new opportunities to learn and grow and serve, even right here and now. Other impossibilities now seem possible. And we're savoring the moment better, deeper, than we had before.

Though you're unlikely to join our adventure over-seas, please join in our adventurous spirit. Find a dream to chase, a new experience to live. In Walden, Thoreau wrote:

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life... and see if I could not learn what [life] had to teach."

Wherever your adventures take you - to the woods, a foreign country, or a new cultural event in your own back yard - live them deeply and suck out all the learning and experience you can, "...and not, when [you] came to die, discover that [you] had not lived."