Dreams

Dreams, we all have them.

We start working on our fantasies and aspirations when we are just little tikes. For girls we might pretend we are the princess who gets swept off her feet by prince charming. For boys maybe it’s hitting the winning homerun in the final game of the World Series.

But something happens as we get older. I have seen it with my own eyes as my small children have grown up and are now teenagers.  Their childhood dreams have all but fallen by the wayside and now they find themselves wrestling and grappling with “real” world realities.

My daughter asked me the other day why some people’s dreams come true and some don’t.

Why do some of us fail and some of us succeed with our dreams. What happens to us when we lose sight of our dreams? Do we fail as human beings…no, of course not. But I do believe there is a part of a person’s heart that does fade away…which in my book is never a good thing.

As we grow up we are given advice along the way…this advice I think can make us or break us as human beings. Some people are dream squashers. You know the type…“You can’t do that! You’re too short. You’ll never reach it!”  OR  “You’ll have to compete with thousands of people to get that audition…are you crazy? You’re just not that good.”

Some people are dream riders…they keep your dreams as their own and live vicariously through you…at all costs.  “You can’t quit now…We’ve worked so hard. Now we only have three more hours of practice today and the pageant (insert game, match, tournament, contest) is tomorrow. We have to win tomorrow.

And still some people are dream seekers…always chasing another tomorrow and always looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. “Honey, I know it’s the last of our savings, but I really think this time it will pay off. All of those people on that TV commercial can’t be lying.”

 So how do we do it all? How do we stop listening to the nay sayers, swipe the suckers of life off our backs and believe in ourselves? How do we live our dreams and not someone else’s? How do we keep our inner soul happy dreaming, and balance the realities of life?

Dreams can be small or they can be big and can last a lifetime. I still have a lot of things in my “dream book” of life.  I want a motorcycle ( I know, my mother would cringed at that one), I want to write a book, I’d like to teach for a while, and I would like really like to go to culinary school to become a chef, which transformed itself for a time into a pastry chef.   My kids and I used to have this dream when they were little of owning a bakery together. We had built it in our heads for years and when things got too stressy in our house that would be the bedtime story. We would decide wallpaper (edible of course), counter seats (peppermint swirls tops), edible spoons and whatnot, and before I knew it, they would be asleep with happy thoughts (and me too). This dream, for me anyway, has given way to owning a pub on the beach on some distant island with my boyfriend. Sounds much more fun and less work than a bakery. I also really want to learn how to play the sax. That one I had forgotten about until I starting writing this blog. And my favorite of all my dreams is being a great grandmother. I don’t know why, but I just know that I’ll live to be 108 and be the biggest kick in the pants great granny ever!

I have so many things I want to do when I grow up. I seriously just want my finger in every pie possible.  Learning to me is fun and I can usually pick up and handle pretty decently anything put in front of me. So most things I approach as a new adventure rather than drudgery.

 I do think though that somewhere we all get pretty pragmatic about our dreams and realize that reality has a different notion of what is fantasy and what is fact. I think that’s why we play so much when we are kids…and why we let our children play.

I think as we get older we believe somehow we gain some idiotic, monumental perspective that gives us the right to push away our dreams and insist we grown up. I for one have quite the Peter Pan complex and so does my boyfriend Craig. We get into sooo much trouble. Our kids are always telling us to “stop…you’re embarrassing us” or “grow up!” I swear we get the giggles at the most inappropriate times. But Craig makes me smile. He makes me laugh so hard I can hardly breathe sometimes. And on days when we are both beaten up so hard from life’s crummy blows, we sit back and dream about our pub on the beach. What it would be like, what the inside will look like, the floor plan and the different food we would serve.

We all need dreams…even if they morph over the years into something else. They are all still inside us and drive our very soul.

When I started my STEPABLES® in 1999, people in my industry said it was a stupid idea. No one would buy plants you could walk on….that’s crazy! No one will buy them.  No one!!!  Well, after only a few short months on the market we were featured on Rebecca’s Garden and to our surprise Rebecca brought our plants along to Good Morning America and showed off STEPABLES® as a cool thing to get if you are a gardener. Charlie Gibson even introduced us as a cool new thing called STEPABLES®….Now I would say that was definitely a dream come true! I never envisioned that happening or remotely even dreamed it, but it changed my life forever…It was better than any dream I could have thought up…so I think it merits a big gold star in my dream book. We immediately became an overnight sensation and launched the product nationwide soon after.

So 2010 to me is our official 10 year anniversary of STEPABLES®.  What I set out to do with my business was to create something that would get a lot everyday people really interested in gardening and at the same time have a major impact on the horticultural industry. The year 2000 was the year when my dream became a reality. As I look back over ten years, I can say that we have inspired millions of people to dig in the dirt. We inspire people take off their shoes, feel the love of their yard, all the while doing something ecologically sound for the earth.  We’ve also managed to “lighten up” a very tightly wound-up industry…just by being passionate about what we do and enjoying the ride along the way. We have more fun than anyone in our industry and it shows.

I am very proud of what STEPABLES® has become. It is a dream that I could have never mapped out, yet it has been an adventure of a life time.

Rachel, I am not sure why some people’s dreams come true and some don’t. Maybe they do and some people are just too busy trying to find the pot of gold that they don’t realize it’s been at their feet the whole time. It may not be full of gold, but memories, smiles, laughter, tears and a life rich with dreams.

Life is what you make folks….dream away, and dig in the dirt with unbridled passion until you are completely covered from head to toe. I think that’s when it happens…It’s at that moment when you are completely saturated in your life that you realize dreams do come true.

Now go get dirty out there!

 Fran