Dreaming Big

Two little birds were our breakfast guests this morning. My partner and I ate on the patio of a local restaurant called ‘Olga’s,’ after the owner, by everyone in Boquete. Although there is a sign out front with the actual name of the establishment, I’m sure no-one actually knows what it says. Olga, or one of her helpers, puts out some fresh fruit for our little feathered friends every morning, and these two birds were among several who came to feast.

Boquete is changing at a dizzying pace. New buildings are going up everywhere. New residential developments are being planned, our Roca Milagro project among them. Many of the locals dream of making that one big property sale, and then having a pile of money to live on. This, after likely having eked out a subsistence lifestyle for decades, or possibly even through multiple generations of the same family. Everyone has big dreams.

That’s OK. Everyone should have big dreams. What if no-one dreamed big? We wouldn’t have cars, airplanes, space travel, computers and cell phones. And we wouldn’t be able to play Super Mario on our personal video game console. Of course, some think that we would be better off without all these things. Not me. I could do without video games, but I like the rest of the things that we all get to take for granted, all because a bunch of someones dreamed big.

My father, born in 1904 in Poland, ploughed fields with horses, rode to town in a horse-drawn buggy, and basically lived through the age of the automobile, the airplane, the jet, the rocket, the advent of computers and much more. To him, the changes in lifestyle that we all take for granted were astounding. We all get pretty blase about these things, don‘t we? Perhaps, in our own future, we will also see dramatic changes that will appear as strange and new to us as many of the things I mentioned did to my father.

In my father’s youth, it was a really big deal to travel twenty kilometres by horse and buggy to shop in a larger town. Today, I think nothing of hopping on a plane to Panama to take care of business. I wonder what he would think of all this. He died before I started this latest adventure of mine. Maybe he would simply think that I was being foolish, and that I should stay closer to home. But that wouldn’t be as much fun. Dream big, remember? And we have to enjoy ourselves, because one day it will be too late for anything but regrets. And then, someday, even regrets won’t be an issue. Dead brain cells don’t think. Nothing will matter.

I’m meeting a lot of people here who are chasing their dreams. Some dream of doing what I’m doing, or something similar. Some have other dreams. We’re all different, and that is how it should be. One man I met today wants to move here, live on $2,000 per month, and work in an orphanage. That’s his big dream. He worked as an energy trader in the United States, made a caboodle of money, now he wants to change his lifestyle completely. Maybe the fact that he is going through a divorce has something to do with it. Or, maybe, he really has had a lifetime dream of helping orphans. Who knows? That would definitely qualify as a big dream, in my books. What could possibly be of more value than helping little kids without parents get a proper head start on life? Not much!

Let’s all dream big. The world will be a better place for it.