Trimming the Size of Dreams

Over the summer, we built an Arts & Crafts style bookcase: solid wood, heavy as a piano, six feet tall, and bearing that sweeping curve combined with straight lines that sing Arts & Crafts. At the same time, the family room was undergoing a facelift, with board and stile paneling. The two projects would look beautiful together. When we moved the bookcase in though, the extended stiles plus the decrease in wall width of 1.5” meant that the bookcase didn’t fit in its designated niche. We could have moved it to the center of the wall, where it could be admired (who needs a sofa anyway). We could have displaced the tv (but the sports teams would have missed us).
We moved the bookcase to another room, and said, “We’ll build another with adjusted dimensions next year.” Maybe we will; maybe we will be following another project’s lure. [Arts & Crafts style end table with a cabin underneath for the dogs.]
We could say that we muffed the project: should have, could have. We say, we built something that we enjoyed building. We’re happy it turned out as well as it did. We learned things. And we had fun.
This dream turned out to need a decrease of 6” to fit easily into the space; we chose to use another space. That’s okay. I’d rather start with a dream too big, than one too small; rather want to earn enough money that I have money to share with others, than earn just enough to pay my bills, budgeting to the penny each month.
If we have a dream that’s too large for the existing space, maybe we need to look for a larger space. Don’t dream too small. Yes, we need to ensure that the dream is right for us. We need to find a dream that we can devote our energy and time to. We need to match our dreams and our souls. But we also need to remember that when we trim the size of our dreams so they don’t require us to stretch our beings, then we are settling, not dreaming.