A lot has happened since the before picture of our turn of the century farm house. If you’ve been following us on our personal social accounts, we’ve fed you bits and pieces of our journey. Thanks for your encouragement along the way.
We received a lot of, “You’re living the dream” comments. To be honest, hearing, “You’re living the dream” is a difficult comment to process — especially for people who like to tell the whole truth. Yes, in many ways, this project is a dream. But, for weird reasons that today’s dictionary leaves off of it’s definition of a dream.
If you’re my age or older, you might understand. We grew up with big, impossible dreams that only the courageous were willing to take on — and in many cases, die for. MLK had a dream that we’re still working on, 56 years after his death. MLK died two months before I was born. I know that his dream shaped all of us who came after, even if it was just its echo.
If you’re on my team, or have been in my studio, you know the other dream. JFK released it in 1962 to a crowd at Rice University. This speech was the pistol blast that started our race to land on the moon.
“There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,
because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. ”
When I heard his dream at Long Elementary School. it was an old echo from a man many years dead. But, it stuck, and shaped my understanding of “living the dream.” The best dreams are hard to live.
This brings up the question … where did all of the hard, worthwhile dreams go? You still hear of people starting businesses or taking on their first marathon. Those are hard dreams, but they are dreams that few of us will dream and even fewer accomplish.
More common are easy dreams. We dream about winning the lottery, retiring on a beach, and how AI, robots and autonomous vehicles will free us from difficult things. And, because these are our dreams, this is where we are investing. I have no doubt that we will work less hard in the near future and achieve some degree of our easy goal. And, in doing so, we will become less relevant than ever before.
I know, it’s a long set up for this unfiltered, unglamorous gallery of photos. While I’ll share some of the “after” images at some point, these aren’t them. These photos show what hard dreams look like while they are coming true.
