noticed

"hope deferred makes the heart sick,
but a dream fulfilled is a wellspring of life."
-proverbs 13:12-

i've been thinking about this a lot lately. hope is such a funny thing. an odd entity. sometimes i feel like the first half of this verse is the story of my life, and i'm still waiting to find out if the other half is actually true. i can only imagine it is. i can only hope that it is. but sometimes i have tendancies to hyperbolize my circumstances. at least in my own head. in actuality i've seen many dreams fulfilled in my life. sometimes i've had dreams suddenly fulfilled that i never even knew i had. i guess i think that not seeing your dreams come true is not nearly as much of a tragedy as thinking that none of your dreams have come true, and limiting yourself and your dreams always to the intangible. so many people live their lives with huge dreams and aspirations, which is a wonderful thing, but so often they tend to see everything in between as a blur. as something that exists outside the realm of their dreams. what a waste. i absolutely cannot think of a worse way to spend your days. always living in the shadow of something you hope for, but letting everything else pass you by. dream big, by all means. but also dream small. dream simply. i read somewhere that in an effort to show that we're so wrapped up in our little lives, we miss out on everything around us. a study was done in which a violin player of the world symphony orchestra (or whatever it's called), arguably the best violin player in the entire world, was sent into a new york city subway in jeans and a t-shirt to play violin, just to see if anyone would notice. he played beautifully for 8 hours, and maybe a hand full of people stopped to notice. i don't want to waste my life like that anymore. there's so much beauty to be found. tonight i sat at a pizza place and held a conversation with a girl sitting at an adjacent table. her name was charity. we didn't have much to talk about, but i could tell she was lonely and just needed someone to pay attention to her. she'd probably been trying to talk to people all night as she was sitting there, and was probably just ignored. so even though i didn't have much to say, and honestly didn't really want to talk to her, i tried to include her in my conversation as much as i could, simply for the pure fact that it could have made her entire night for someone to notice her and just talk to her. i sit here and talk all high and mighty like i live like this all the time. i don't. i really don't. but i also really wish that i did. there's something beautiful about a life lived in endless possibilities. the possibility of huge dreams being fulfilled all the way down to the dream of just being able to care for someone that needs to be cared for.

i'm rambling. i think what i'm trying to say is this: don't get so caught up in your dreams and passions that you let your life pass you by. you'll find yourself sorely disappointed. i think john lennon said it best:

"life is what happens while we're busy making plans."