Hopes and Dreams

“Hope is not a dream but a way of making dreams become reality”

– Leon Joseph Suenens

 Who wouldn’t love to have money to buy all the items they love? To have a six-figure salary? Spend quality time with your favorite people? And to be the happiest every day in their life without regrets? Hoping everything goes as you wish and to achieve the dreams you have built for yourself.

According to the textbook definition, desire and expectations a person has for their future can be also known as hopes whereas a dream is a series of thoughts, imagination, or a cherished ambition.

Why do you need hopes and dreams?

“Hope is a waking dream”

– Aristotle

Life is never easy. There are many obstacles and problems one faces throughout the journey. Hope is the feeling that drives a person to get through the obstacles, the courage to find solutions to the problems. Therefore, it can be stated that people do need hope. Hope in life boosts the person to approach problems with a mindset and strategy-set suitable for success, thereby increasing the chances to truly accomplish their own goals.

Dreams are the result of the creative imagination of a child. Creative people are often dreamers. Growing up affects a person not only physically but also mentally and most importantly, social norms, cultural boundaries, and beliefs may result in shattered childhood dreams. To keep the dreams alive, one has to set goals to achieve them. This is where our hopes contribute to making our dreams come true.

Are you giving your brain hopes and dreams?

“While there’s life, there’s hope.”

– Stephen Hawking

As we grow old, our unused muscles get weaker, similarly, the parts that we do not tend to use in our brain would start to become less effective. Although many researchers suggest, a good workout, proper nutrition, and a healthy lifestyle for a healthy brain, it is vital to have hope and dreams to make our brain keep on functioning. Although the human body can go on days without food or water, we cannot survive without hope. Hope ignites the willingness to go fight through the struggles, to see the positive side in a problematic situation, and the courage to drag self towards success. It helps people to think better and ultimately influences others as well.

Do we need to have hopes and dreams for a country?

 “People create these extravagant habitats because they have a vision, love of beauty, hopes and dreams.”

– Anne Rice.

Just as much as a person needs hopes and dreams for their life, a country requires it to become stronger, successful, have a radiant future, and overcome unexpected difficulties. Without a common goal, clear vision, dreams, and hopes, a country would surely fail to exist in the current competitive world.

Even if a country is facing great difficulties, the best its citizens can do is to have faith in each other, be ambitious, and have good intentions that the country is going to surpass the hardships. Better yet, be individually stronger to win through the struggles that they had to face.

Thinking about how hopes and dreams can affect a country, Sri Lanka can be taken as a timely example of this, where people have given value to themselves as citizens, envisioning dreams for the country and encouraging hopes for all to have a better future. Encouraging people to have a positive mindset using hopes and dreams, despite many difficulties, brings people with similar ideologies closer so all of them work towards a common goal. This gives value to the people which creates so many other ripple effects in the society. Growth in the power of people to speak up is one such ripple effect. Whilst communication connects people, hopes and dreams bond the people tighter as they all expect the betterment of the country’s future.

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

Written by: Rtr. Imesha Ilangasinghe

Edited by: Rtr. Loshini Gnanasambanthan