What it takes to reach your heart's desire.

Post 357 - In The Wizard of Oz, when the Good Witch asked Dorothy what she learned while she was in Oz, Dorothy replied, "If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it anyway."

It’s easy to forget that the real wizard lives inside us. We have to give ourselves the power to take control of our thoughts, to overcome our fears and follow our yellow brick road if we're to accomplish our dreams and goals. No one else can do it for us.

Barbara Hailey says it takes three things to reach your heart's desire:

1. The knowledge and skills to accomplish the things you want in life.

2. The courage to carry on through all of life's challenges and to never give up on your dreams.

3. The ability to love and to be loved.

The third is probably the most difficult to master. You have to learn how to really love before you can learn how to live. I'm not referring to Hollywood's version of romantic love here. The poet, David Ignatow, explained the kind of love I'm thinking about and why it's so crucial to self-realization as follows:

“The most important thing (in life) is peace of mind . . . growing out of an assurance about one’s relationships with others. Relationships that you can count on that won’t backfire . . . on which you can turn your back and not fear some sort of a reprisal or betrayal. It’s a dependence thing. You have a relationship that becomes a metaphor for your relationship with the rest of the world. And if it’s a secure and loving relationship on which you can count for your physical, mental, and emotional needs to be filled, then you have what most people lack. You have going for yourself a balanced energizing situation. Then you can turn around and put your energy into a lot of different things because you can take this other thing for granted. A person loves you. You know that this love will not fail you under virtually any circumstances. This love is for you and you alone. Something for you that’s for no one else. That’s important. When you have that, I think you have a treasure.”

Longshoreman turned philosopher Eric Hoffer once wrote, "The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves: and we hate others when we hate ourselves."

To live life fully, we need to learn how to love people and use things, instead of using people and loving things. Joy’s twin emotion is love and no one can love alone. Remember the lyric from the Sound of Music:

a song isn't a song until you sing it
a bell isn't a bell until you ring it
love in your heart isn't put there to stay
love isn't love until you give it away.