Follow your dreams and remember

     
           Amanda Bradley presents us with an inspiring poem that motivates us to chase are dreams and never give up. The poem is titled “Follow your Dreams”. It sounds more like a “pep talk” than a poem, but still it is a poem. She tells us in detail that we should never give up on our dreams. As we know life is like a roller coaster, sometime throws us a curve ball or takes us on a spin. It is true, like she says, that in that moment is when we have to be the strongest and never doubt our goal.

But when you're living this experience you obviously don’t have in mind this things, you're just trying to figure it out and sometimes we think it's easier to give up. This is the part when we all start to remember all that we have been through, the good, the bad and the sad. This is the moment when we evaluate if going forward with the original plan is still a good idea. Here we find ourselves on a crossroads, we can either go with our original plan or we can modify it to fit in with the new things we have to consider. This is the most important part in life, it does not come once in a lifetime. We do go through this process over and over again throughout our lives. We take a dream and we try making it a reality and if it gets difficult we stop and evaluate if we need to make a change or if we need to work harder for it.

This is what goes through my mind when I read Bradley’s poem and Dawn Jensen's poem “Remember”. He talks about how life is short and we need to remember the important things in life. Most of all we need to take those memories and put them to good use by giving us motivation to conquer the things we want. Use all the good, the bad and the sad to make us better, not get stuck on the past. I have to admit that this poem is very good but it talks in a past sense which make me remember when our grandparents sat and talked with us about the hardships in life and how we need to overcome them. This poem is like a narration of the memories of someone who has already lived and is passing on the lessons they have learned.

In Bradley’s poem it’s the other way around. The poetic voice is more of a young person's voice. In other words, it feels like the narrator is not at the end of his life, not like in Jensen’s poem where it does feel like the narrator is at the end of his life. In the first poem the narrator sounds more like a mentor that is trying to cheer up someone. This one tells of how when we accomplish things we can use the feeling of satisfaction we get to see how far we have come and where we want to go.

But both poems get their message across. First that we should never give up, no matter what and second that we should remember the things we have gone through. In my opinion, the central idea of both poems is the recipe for being happy. Life is about accomplishing goals and remembering what we have been through to help us go forward in life.  This is what living is about, not choosing the easy way out. Because if living was easy it would not be worth living it.