Dream Bigger

This New Year, Don’t Waste Your Resolutions On Small Dreams.

“Plains and Mountains II” by Bluddha is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Ten years ago we were driving back from the shore, our voices low and soft so to not to wake the baby in the backseat.

My buddy’s boots were on the dashboard, a pile of newspaper listings on his lap, phone numbers written on the back of his hand in pen, up his arm. We had spent the day on docks and in marinas looking for boats; boats for sale, boats abandoned, boats that someone might trade for an old truck, for a few hundred bucks, maybe for tattoos.

His dream was that he would sail to Haiti, Dominica, around the Caribbean, maybe even across the Atlantic someday.

My life at the time was very different: A toddler, a job, a house payment that needed to be paid.

The 2 AM highway street lights moved through the windshield and across his legs in a comfortable cadence. My baby stirred in the backseat, I watched him carefully in the rearview mirror.

“You must think I’m irresponsible,” he said to me quietly, self-consciously.

I have a shoebox in my attic of photographs and this past weekend I sat in the quiet of dust and memories. Unfolding pictures of wild-eyed cross country train rides, I remembered the feel of my back pressed up against the cold metal of a grainer, my best…