Dervla Murphy, Madam Guyon, Richard Bach,Esther Ranzom

Have you ever wondered what motivates you? Do goals fire you into action?  Do you lay out your list of tasks for the day and steadily work through them? Can you picture yourself completing all of those tasks?
Our daughter Zoe has just off to Portugal having won yet another prize at work. Whatever goal they set her she exceeds it.  She organises her time and her team to achieve the most they can in a day with the most amount of fun and reward thrown in. Earning money can be very appealing not for what it is, but for the opportunities it gives. Too many people have been deluded into pursuing things that money cannot buy. In Dervla Murphy's book, Silverland she quotes a Buryat friend called Todo (p.162), "People forget now what has been known for thousands of years. It's good to have enough money, bad and dangerous to have too much. Very rich people are not free; they live in their own sort of Gulag.

On the other hand there are those of us who dream. We create something in our heads that when the ingredients are combined gives a moment of perfection. Some of us are fortunate to look back to a happy childhood and try to recreate what it is we had. Others of us look forward to a future of security and safety. The past has gone, we can do nothing about it. The future is all we have. The present has not fulfilled our dream.

I live somewhere in-between; I dream, but not big dreams. There are moments in the day that I think, this is a dream come true. It might be on my yoga mat holding an asana that I had never held before. It might be soaking up the warmth of the sun with friends and family, surrounded by beautiful colours. It might be a serendipitous discovery of something  knew, an insight or revelation that comes to me. It might be a feeling in the body of strength and energy. Once I was paddling to the Old Man of Hoy with my friend Chris. I looked at his blonde hair, like a Vikings. Behind his yellow boat the 1100 foot sandstone cliffs rose out of the deep water glinting in the sunlight. A black fin cut through the surface between our boats.
We rose and fell on the huge sea like tiny corks. It put me completely into awe like a dream. All we could do was to keep on paddling by the seat of our pants, allowed for a few hours into this magnificent world untamed by mankind.

What is it that you dream? Richard Bach said in, The Gift of Wings, "I never knew anyone who having held onto a dream and worked towards its fulfilment has not one day found that dream to come true." That might be hard to digest for those of us who lack opportunities in life, but how many of us turn down opportunities when they come. Esther Ranzom always finds a way to give, to help others when they need it. But she also believes that when an opportunity comes your way you take it. I find that if you have a hunch to train in something, to educate yourself along a line that interests you, one day you will be presented with an opportunity to explore and use all that you have spent years learning.

In many things you appear to fail, or not yet succeed, depending on whether you are a half cup empty person or a half cup full person. Yet nothing of what you have attempted will be wasted if you hold onto it.

The mystic Madam Guyon was locked away for a time but she could still look upwards to the stars. Her view was not limited by her walls. "Two prisoners looked through the prison bars. One saw the earth, the other saw the stars. "  What do you see?