Yesterday I took my second oldest daughter on a daddy daughter date. She’s almost twelve, and in many ways the complete opposite of her older sister. She’s an empath, she loves to talk, and she’s a big extrovert. I never have to worry about filling the silence with her, conversation just flows nonstop. As we sat at her favorite place, Starbucks, drinking a white hot chocolate (me) and some kind of vanilla bean frapachino (her), it was definitely my best moments of the day. We talked about friendships and worries and race and spirituality; it was a wide ranging dialogue. My favorite part was sharing a dream I have for opening a bookstore (our favorite place as a family to hang out). We talked about how cool it would be for the girls to work at the bookstore after school, able to enjoy their own supply of books anytime they wanted. Even when she told me that the location we’d been scouting for our potential shop was already opening a bookstore, that didn’t seem to deter us from dreaming together. In retrospect, it’s actually pretty cool how our dreaming wasn’t blocked by circumstance. 

I’m convinced as a father and an educator that the best gift we can provide our young people is the ability to be present with our dreams. They need to see the people they love pursuing the things they love. When we dream, we re-imagine the world around us, we’re tapping into our creative genius. This gives them hope. If we can do it, why not them? They need to see us dream, and really it’s less about the full achievement of the dream than it is the pursuit. 

I believe dreaming is a gift we all have, but somewhere along the way during our childhood perhaps many of us are told that dreaming is a waste of time. But the desire and capacity to dream never goes away. Even into adulthood, there’s still opportunities to reclaim lost dreams. 

I look at my life right now and I marvel at what the girls get to witness. They’re experiencing the manifestation of two parents who are living out their dreams, and learning to pursue new ones. I get it, sometimes it’s hard to dream, particularly when you look around and the conditions seem less than ideal for the pursuit of any dream. But that’s when we need dreams the most. As Tupac said, reality is wrong, dreams are for real. Langston Hughes wrote, hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly. 

Dreaming isn’t something we have to learn, it’s what we are born to do, and when we learn to do it, perhaps we’ll also remember something more true about ourselves.