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Acceptance(2)

                                        The last time I wrote about acceptance, I was writing about the problem of people who don't accept our kindness, who mistrust our efforts to be courteous. This time I'm writing about acceptance in a different way. This time I've been thinking about our acceptance of things as they are. I urge that we always try our hardest, do our best, to achieve our goals. But we must do it in the framework of reality. We can't set a goal and imagine our way to it.

                                                   We all, to some extent, create a dream world where people and events are as we would like them to be. It's this dream world that forms our hopes, keeps us working, keeps us moving forward. As long as we use our dream world as a target, as a goal, the dream world is useful. But sometimes we forget that we need to work, to make an effort, to achieve our dream world; sometimes we forget that our dreams don't simply come true by accident, that the mere wishing doesn't make it so.

                                                  If we don't have hopes and dreams, we won't be very productive. I can't imagine striving merely for the sake of striving. We must have a purpose to our efforts. Although I urge small goals, intermediate goals, goals that form parts of a bigger purpose, some goal is necessary for us to be at our best. It's true in work, in friendship, in fact in every sphere of life, that we can't simply relax and assume everything will go our way without effort. Even those who win the lottery must at least go to the trouble of entering.

                                                  When we stop dreaming. when we stop hoping, we are dead in a sense. But, if we reject reality, if we foolishly believe we've achieved our dreams before they've come true, if we stop striving to make our dreams come true, to fulfill our hopes, we are equally dead.

                                                  Keep dreaming and keep trying to make dreams real. But don't assume the dream is reality.

4-30-07