Dream, Always!

Today, I am celebrating my granddaughter’s birthday. More accurately, I am contemplating my granddaughter’s birthday. I do not celebrate the day, really, I celebrate her, the person she has become in the last nine years. I celebrate her smile, her humor, her laughter, her sweet spirit, her strength, her talent and her beauty. I celebrate hope for the ways she will grow and mature.

I want to tell her everything about life, how it will lift her up and also let her down. I want to tell her about love and how to know when it’s real. I want to talk with her about faith and what it means to draw close to God. I want to tell her about the joy of life so that she will know how to transcend the sorrows of the world and claim abiding happiness and contentment. I want to tell her about the healing power of laughter, and of tears. I want to tell her that she has within her all the resilience she needs to overcome adversity. I want to tell her to dream, always. And I want to tell her about inner strength and how to develop the ability to rise up on wings of confidence and soar. 

I want to tell her that I will be near her always, so that when she falls, I can pick her up, wipe off the dust, clean her wounds, tell her she is okay, and set her back on her life journey. But that I cannot promise, because I won’t be with her forever in this life.

So I want to tell her about the adventures that marked my life and how each one made me wiser and stronger. And that’s really my point for this day’s post: that I need to make adventures! I need to live a life full of new experiences and new discoveries. I need to fill my life with substance. What I do and what I discover in this life will be my legacy for my granddaughter and for my other grandchildren. I think of the words of Cristina Garcia on this subject.

Before you know it you’ll be my age telling your own granddaughter the story of your life, and you wanna make it an interesting one, don’t you? You wanna be able to tell her some adventures, some excitements, some something. How you live your life . . . is a gift for those who come after you, a kind of inheritance.   (Cristina Garcia)

I hope the story I leave for my granddaughter will give her courage and determination. I hope she will find in my life story an example of one who chased dreams always and actually caught them, sometimes. I hope that in my story, she will see perseverance and persistence, so that she will know that she can run like the wind toward every dream she chooses.

Happy birthday, my sweet Jordan! I love you.