All These Dreams

The fear inside, the hills we’ve climbed the tears this side of heaven, all these dreams inside of me I swear we’re gonna get there... sooner or later—Mat Kearney

What do you really want and need? A question I have been trying to answer for months, in what seems like all arenas of my life. Work, school, relationships, free time, even for dinner. Try thinking about that question every time you make a decision. It is surprisingly difficult to answer.

Not only is it difficult to answer, it’s scary. There are layers to it and when those layers get pulled back we are faced with raw desires that might not be easily satisfied. Then what? What if what we want and need we simply can’t have right now?

As I have been running alone on these dark winter nights, this question has surfaced over and over again. I’ve celebrated finally finding some pieces after months of uncertainty—a new job and a school program that seem to be the perfect fit for what I most want and need out of my career right now—and wondered about the pieces that remain. There are many. As I get closer to the truth of those remaining needs, the quest for meeting them seems daunting, even impossible at times.

Living in your own truth, deciding what you most want and need, it is an essential part of the human journey. No one can decide this for you and yet so often we let others tell us what is best for us. Whether it is pressure from advertising or culture—bigger houses, promotions, marriage and children, new cars—or just advice on how to live from family and friends. In my life, the dreams I am most passionate about are the ones that are the most impossible to explain to anyone else, the ones that don’t make sense on paper.

It takes courage to stand firm in your truth. It is so much easier to accept a life decided for us. To never question whether or not we are settling. It is no easy task to put your real dreams out in front of you. To risk going for them. What if we fail? What if people think we are crazy? That’s us out there on the line. It costs us so much less to fail to reach a dream that was never our own to begin with.

It is because of running I am able to discover and go after my own dreams. Running in the dark makes it hard to look anywhere else but inside. Sometimes running itself is the thing I most want and need, and sometimes it’s the vehicle to a clearer picture of what that is. Sometimes running just reminds me that I don’t have it all figured out yet but I am, nonetheless, still moving on my own path. I have been out in the dark, a long way from home and hurting, wondering if I will ever finish. I would rather be in that darkness than someone else’s light. It’s there that I know my own strength. In the darkness I have faith that this won’t last forever. I discover in those times, if I keep believing, I will find what I need inside to face any obstacle.

With every run I shake off the noise of our environment and the burden of others’ expectations to find myself—raw, vulnerable, full of dreams, and fighting to believe that sooner or later I will find my way to them and all the fear, hills and tears will all be worth it.