There’s a poem by Langston Hughes that I’ve taught in my class before called “Dreams”. It’s a wonderful poem and not very long:

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

Dreams are what keep us going in life. Without them, life doesn’t have much purpose. The difficulty with dreams is that they are a marathon, not a sprint.

Nobody just gets up one day and runs a marathon. Maybe somebody can, but not most people. Running a marathon takes time and training. You ahve to start small and add more distance as you build up to the marathon distance. It’s hard work, and it doesn’t happen overnight.

The same is true of achieving a dream. It often starts out fine. We get this idea of something we want to do. Run a marathon. Play a concert. Write a novel. Build a deck. It often starts off as a hobby that turns into a love that turns into a passion. Eventually, that passion becomes a driving force in our lives.

We often see initial success that helps encourage us to get started. Paolo Coelho talks about this in his novel The Alchemist. But as we get into the pursuit of that dream, things get more difficult, more complicated. When I started playing guitar, I started learning some basic chords. It was easy. I took to it quickly. But then I had to face the dreaded bar chords. It was rough. It took me some time to get bar chords figured out.

Working toward a dream always takes us to greater difficulties, and we have to decide if we’re going to give up or keep going. Here’s where dreams often die for people. The reality is, chasing a dream isn’t always new and invigorating. At some point, it become a discipline. I had to practice a long time before I mastered bar chords, and eventually it became something I didn’t even have to think about when I played. Marathon runners have to train daily to work their way up to longer distances.

A lot of people can’t make it past this stage. They get impatient and want immediate results. They don’t like the “boring” part. Nobody really likes the repetitive action of practice and training, regardless of what the end goal is.

So here we stand at the crossroad of continuing on and giving up.

Don’t give up.

Hold fast to your dreams. Especially when they get difficult.