Thinking About Dreams

Summer is a season of hope and dreams for me, but as I grow older, I find many of my dreams to be stale. Without dreams, I lose the essential part of myself that makes me "me." But, when I dreamed those dreams as a child, a teenager, even a young adult, I dreamed them with the anticipation of their eventual fulfillment. It disappoints me now to see how anticlimactic life really is. When will the fun, long-awaited part of it begin?

I would sound like a fool to say that life hasn't been beautiful, that it hasn't been filled with all of the elements that make life what it is: lessons, heartbreaks and love, memories of joy, adventures, and people who will never be forgotten. This is not the part that makes life sad for me, this is the part that makes the sadness of life bearable. It is impossible, though, to deny the sadness of knowing that certain dreams may not come true, especially those dreams that I still seem to hold out hope for. There are little things that I've always wanted, deep inside, and reading about them just doesn't make the cut anymore. I'm a terrible case of dissatisfaction sometimes, but where I once was content to dream and chose dreams over life, I am not unfulfilled by empty dreams. It seems useless to dream endlessly of certain things that have not occurred, yet without dreaming, I am not me.

So how do I keep the two happy without upsetting the delicate balance of each?