“There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.” – Gilbert K. Chesterton

Holding back. We all do it. We have this dream in our heads that is so big and so audacious that we start to trim it back in our minds into something that seems more realistic…something we could share with others without having them think we were crazy to believe we could pull off something so outlandishly big. We trim a little here and cut a little there until that castle we’d dreamed about in the clouds becomes a little hut that doesn’t scare us so much to build. But that hut was never our actual dream…we settled for something less…because we were too afraid to break the rules of architecture we decided would hold us back.

The great irony is that we decided they would hold us back without recognizing that maybe those rules don’t apply here – maybe they would have in the past but don’t anymore, or maybe they don’t apply and we just took someone else’s word that they did, or maybe they never applied at all – but we would never know because we allowed them to apply which made them real and made them stop our dream from coming true.

I myself have been guilty of holding back on a big dream because it just seemed too large to attempt. Which might be surprising for some to hear given how many big dreams I’ve gone after and achieved. Yet its true – at times I still find myself mentally trimming a castle down to a hut. Then I force myself to write a blog like this one so I can be reminded that I was not meant to build huts…I was meant to build castles…

We are all meant to build castles. And each one of us was born with different talents and abilities that were specifically given to us to let us build a very uniquely designed castle. One we were personally meant to build. So don’t trim down the dream you have. Rather than thinking of all the reasons it can’t be built, spend your time thinking of ways to make it happen.

~Amy Rees Anderson