When Did We Become Our Parents?

“Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die
life is a broken-winged bird, that cannot fly.”
Langston Hughes

by Skip Cohen

It's been a couple of weeks since I shared a Sunday Morning Reflections post. I had simply burned out and needed a break from anything that tied to social media. I needed to recharge!

This morning when I sat down to write, my mind was blank, but in a good way...like a blank canvas waiting for a painter's creative juices to flow. For ideas I wandered through my Adobe Stock downloads and *poof* there they were, two images that got me thinking.

When we were kids, one of the most fun days was when anybody in the neighborhood got a new refrigerator or stove. The excitement was never about the appliances but about the giant cardboard boxes they came in. Every appliance came with a secret passage to a land of imagination. Those boxes became spaceships, castles, race cars, and the list went on and on.

We're all just as creative today, but too often we're not having as much fun. Our imaginations are over-managed and harder to let loose. Our creativity is limited more to our profession, and it's not as much fun as dreaming without boundaries. We became adults and learned about risk-taking, and it broke so many of us. In a small way, that was part of why I recently needed to take a break.

Many years ago, I published a one-of-a-kind newsletter for our high school reunion. It was called "When Did We Become Our Parents." We were all coming up on sixty years old, and the publication had every participant's backstory since graduation from high school. 

Here's my point: When did we trade in fun and the freedom to simply dream for the practicality of the real world? When did so many of you feel so discouraged by dreams that never bloomed that you gave up and accepted the reality of our parents telling us to "grow up"!

Let's get back to those dreams! Every dream, regardless of how impractical it might seem today still has a spark of potential simply because it makes you smile and your heart skip a beat. It's about the excitement of life - don't mistake it for AFib.

Wishing all of you a terrific day ahead. Make it a day that leaves room for time to pull some of those past dreams out of storage.  Put them where they belong - on the front burner!  Don't forget you've got help too - your co-pilots are those people you're closest to - the ones that get the eleven-second therapeutic hugs I've been writing about for the last decade!

Happy Sunday...or Monday on the other side of the world!

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“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost;
that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
Henry David Thoreau