Significance.

Significant. The word of the day. Find something significant in your life. A person, a moment, memory, amulet, ideal or dream. Something significant to you. Be thankful for it.

Language of America.

Look for the word.

The American Dream

When you picture the American Dream, what do you picture?  California shades and a Ferrari? Money? Mansion? Materials? A simple life out in the country with no worries?

If this is your picture, you’re wrong.

The Dream is not a constant. It’s a goal. It requires sweat. It requires tears. It requires blood. When things don’t work out, when you’re down and unhappy, remember, that is a good thing. It is in the pursuit, not the accomplishment, but the gory pursuit of our imagined dreams that they are made true. Water is stronger than rock. Change does not happen in an instant, but by the hammer's repeated fluid blows.

The American Dream is the freedom to pursue the life we imagine for ourselves.

Walt Disney imagined a world of magic. Losing everything in that pursuit, he hopped on a bus to Los Angeles, owning nothing but a cardboard box, a change of underwear, forty dollars and a side reel of cartoons. Martin Luther King had a Dream. His voice, his life, and death, played out in pursuit of that Dream and now, people of all races celebrate him, side by side.

The list of heroes is endless. All are willing to sacrifice everything for a notion, an idea, imagined life, a belief, a Dream.

But you don’t have to be a hero to pursue a Dream. From teachers to janitors. From lawyers and politicians to social workers and receptionists. From doctors to athletes. In today’s world many invent their own occupation, and many more occupations are yet realized. Even the stay at home Mother who believes her children will improve the world. There are many among us already engaged in the pursuit of the life we have imagined.  

And you know what? When we give our dreams our all, like Disney and King, we succeed…

I have learned this, at least, from my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the directions of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. –Thoreau.

By this success, the pursuit of those dreams which promise global and local happiness will benefit the nation. Indeed, the most powerful action a US citizen can take, arguably even more powerful than a vote, is the act of this gory pursuit of a imagined, better world.

It is therefore our American obligation to pursue our imagined lives, to pursue our dreams.

 

So. What’s your dream?

Belieber.

I can't Belieber I'm saying this, but there is something about Bieber that encompasses the American philosophy. Perhaps its the importance of Beliebering.