The Drawer
"The most expensive thing most people own is an unlived dream." — Steve Martin – Vision-Keeper and Dream Coach
The Drawer
There is a drawer in the back of your mind that you haven’t opened in years.
You know the one.
You put something there when you were young enough to still believe in it — a dream, a direction, a voice that said this, this is what I want — and then you got busy, as people do, and the drawer stayed closed.
You told yourself you’d come back to it.
Later.
After the mortgage.
After the kids.
After the promotion, the milestone, the comfortable finish line that kept moving.
But later became a long time ago, and the drawer is still there, and what’s inside it is still there, and the remarkable thing — the thing that still amazes me after twenty-five years of sitting across from people at exactly this threshold — is that it hasn’t expired.
Dreams are patient in a way that ambitions are not.
They don’t need feeding.
They don’t need progress reports.
They just wait.
Walt Disney kept coming back to his drawer.
After every bankruptcy, every stolen contract, every project that failed in front of the whole world, he would find his way back to the fundamental question: what do I actually want to build?
And the answer was always there.
He never had to invent it again.
He just had to remember it.
Maybe that’s the real definition of a dream — not something you create, but something you keep remembering.
And maybe the real work isn’t finding it.
Maybe the real work is simply getting quiet enough, still enough, honest enough, to hear it again.
Open the drawer.
It’s time.
My grandpa always said: knowing what you want is the beginning of everything. Most people skip that step and wonder why they feel lost.