Keep on Believing

This evening, I went to see a play in which my brother's sister-in-law (or my sister-in-law's sister) was performing. It turned out to by a double-feature; before the play I had gone to see, Bye Bye Birdie, there was a children's performance of Cinderella. Both plays were very good, particularly the singing.

If you've seen Disney's Cinderella, you probably remember that, toward the beginning of the film, the title character sings a song about dreams. "A dream is a wish your heart makes," she sings. She goes on to sing, "No matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep on believing, the dream that you wish will come true." Though the performance of that song was beautiful and mesmerizing, I couldn't help thinking afterwards that there's a lot more to it than that.

Believing that something will happen isn't enough to make it happen. It takes effort and dedication to make dreams come true. However, I also kind of get Cinderella's point. That much effort requires a strong source of motivation, and one source of motivation is a belief that you can succeed. It's easier to chase a dream when you believe that you can catch it. In fact, if you don't think that the dream will ever come true, you might not be able to muster the motivation to pursue the dream at all.

Believing in our dreams isn't enough to make them a reality, but it is a good place to start. Having motivation is essential, and believing that we can make our dreams come true may give us the motivation we need to actually make it happen. While we can't just wish and hope and wait for our fairy godmothers to magically make our dreams come true, we need to believe in our dreams, and keep on believing in them, in order to make them come true ourselves.