“I never failed once.  It just happened to be a 2000-step process.”

— Thomas Alva Edison

Yesterday I was thinking about the way we bring our dreams to life.  I suggested that we should stop making back-up plans and be “all in” where the work of our hear and soul are concerned.  I am inspired when I listen to my own thoughts on this subject, but what follows is another question.  What do we do when we are “all in” and the results just don’t happen?  Do we then distrust our own creativity?  Do we decide that our dreams should be relegated to sleep time and considered too lofty and far away to ever become real?  I know that my own experience has been a series of false starts.  My dream will awaken me — not from sleep, but from living in someone else’s dream.  I don’t mean to say that the daily events of my life have no meaning; but unless my dream is woven into them, I feel like a sleepwalker.  Only when our personal dream calls us to live rather than simply exist can we pretend to be fully alive.  Sleeping and dreaming, waking and then drifting off again to the land where dreams sleep, being pulled again by the dream to waking and walking — it seems that bringing dreams to life sometimes requires more than one attempt.

Edison had a dream.  He dreamed of seeing a world that was illuminated by his idea of an incandescent bulb powered by electricity.  He dreamed of a day when electricity would cost less than candles and only the wealthy would continue to use paraffin wax for light.  Today, candles are a novelty.  Edison’s dream became real; but it was not a simple process.  We can learn a lot from Thomas Edison and the way he viewed the process that gave life to his dream.

What do we think when a dream calls us to awaken and then does not materialize?  How much do we trust our dreams?  Do we allow one failure to mean that the dream has no merit?  When do we know that it is time to move on and leave a dream behind?  Edison also says, “Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.”  Suppose our unsuccessful attempts at living our dreams are not failures at all.  Suppose they are part of a refining process that helps us to clarify what our dream will look like when it finally is part of our world?  Suppose it takes 2000 steps before we discover that our dream is beautiful in ways we could not have imagined with only 1999 attempts?

Listen to the dream of your soul.  If it keeps calling you to awaken from your sleepwalking life, if it refuses to be put to rest even though it seems to have failed in the past, consider that you are still in the refining process.  Consider that your dream may burst into existence after one more round of  hard work.  Your deepest dream never dies.  Listen to its call, and remember that sometimes it takes 2000 steps to birth a dream.