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When a dream diesMay 26 '00 Write an essay on this topic.This epinion is rather long and for that I apologize. I want to share what it is like to see a dream crumble in front of your eyes and how you can work through the disappointment. This is in the Marriage section not because it relates to problems in a marriage, but because it describes the strains of pursuing a dream. A wise man once said to me "dead dreams can live", after my experiences I know he was right. On our second wedding anniversary I took my wife on a 3 hour drive to Hunstanton for a picnic. Hunstanton is a small seaside resort on the East Coast of England, about 50 miles due north of Cambridge. Neither of us had ever been there before, but on our way back home we felt an overwhelming sense that it was the right place for us to live. We spent the next few months dreaming about living by the sea and starting a family in a little country village. In order for that to happen we would need to find jobs in the area, sell our house, buy a new house, and ... er ... get pregnant! It all seemed perfectly possible to us and we started looking for jobs and getting the house ready to sell. One year passed with no real movement, and whilst we kept on visiting the area every couple of months and making many friends, there seemed to be no jobs for us. I sent off over 100 applications and whilst I had some interviews, the jobs just weren't right. Then, suddenly things started to move. We found a buyer for our house and found a house we wanted to buy. Although it needed a lot of work doing to it and needed planning permission to finish the work, the new house had great potential. Within a couple of months we had sold our house and moved into a small rented apartment. The next few months seemed to be disappointment after disappointment. I still couldn't find a job, we were living in a tiny apartment with boxes everywhere, and the supposedly easy-to-get planning permission turned into a nightmare. Then, in true roller-coaster style, we were hit by a batch of things going right: • My wife got pregnant - fantastic! • I got offered a dream job • My wife also got offered a part-time job until the baby was born We were going to move in 2 months - now all we needed now was a house to move into! I spent hours battling with the planning committees overcoming all of their objections until the last day when permission should have been given. They came up with something that had never been raised before, didn't tell us about it and refused permission there and then. That's the moment our dream died 2 years seemingly wasted, 3 weeks left until we started new jobs in a place where there was no place to live. And my wife was pregnant. I remember getting the telephone call and not wanting to believe it. We had spent nearly a year trying to get this house, had every room planned out and had started buy things for it. It seemed so cruel that just at the moment when everything should have fallen into place, it was snatched away from us. We were in despair that night. We decided to continue with our trip to the village that weekend and spoke to some of our friends there. There was another house that had been up for sale for nearly 3 months - not a good sign because houses there nearly always sold within a week. We said that we would look at it anyway. It was a cottage dating back to around 1800 that had been a pub and was now used as a shop. It was dirty, messy and very badly decorated. But within 5 minutes of being in it my wife looked at me and we both knew it was the one. We had never been afraid of doing a lot of work on a house, but this one had amazing potential and was twice the size of the house we lost. We agreed to buy it half an hour later. I thank God that he didn't give up on us and actually made our reality even better than our dream. This experience has taught me many things, but here are the most important ones: • If your dream dies, don't give up. Sometimes route 1 fails, but keep trying if you know it's right. • Trust your partner's intuition - often they see the obvious things that you don't. • Life should be enjoyed. Even in the hard times, keep things in perspective - you're not dying and you have food to eat. Be thankful for all that you have. Dead dreams can live? Yes, they can, and sometimes a dream has to die in your mind so that it can be reborn.  |
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