This past weekend my roommate and I were feeling crafty. It started in the morning and the feeling continued to get stronger throughout the day. Thoughts of painting, photographing and even knitting were thrown around until mid-afternoon when I remembered something that I have been wanting to do for a long time. "Lets make dream boards" I said as we roamed the aisles of Target, looking for something, anything to grab our attention and occupy our time for the evening.
A short while later there we were. Sprawled out across our hardwood living room floor sharing a pair of scissors, a glue stick and a bottle of white wine. We laughed while reviewing the supplies we had to work with, a combination of old health and fashion magazines and two extremely trendy furniture catalogs. "This could get interesting" my roommate sighed as she began cutting her first piece out of last season's In Style.
As I began to flip through the books, cutting out pieces of my own, I thought about all the things I want out of my life. I started daydreaming about all the traveling I will do, the books I will read (or write) and the people that I will spend my time with. And with each turn of the page I found an image or a phrase that fit perfectly into my dream life. With every cut I added a new element to my future, and I realized that though I'm not getting any younger, my dreams just keep getting bigger and bigger.
Later that night, after our wine was long gone and our fingers were sore from cutting, we stepped back and admired each other's boards. "How'd you find that word?" I whined. "Why is yours cuter than mine?" she responded back. Only after a brief debate and concluding that both of our boards were equally as wonderful, we sunk into our white couch, relaxing and assessing the mess we had made. Paper scraps and thumb tacks covered the floor, while empty stemless wine glasses perched on our make shift coffee table. "I can't clean this tonight" she said as her mouth opened wide with a yawn. Grabbing our dream boards we headed to our rooms feeling both accomplished and fatigued. After hanging my board and getting comfy, I lay in bed staring at my work of art. It was then that I wondered how many of those dreams will actually come true. How many times over the next few months or years will I look at the board, and how many times will I update and add to it? And as I drifted off to sleep I wondered about that night and if during my sleep I would in fact, live out my reality and dream big.
