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About This Author
My name is Joy, and I love to write.
Why poetry, here? Because poetry uplifts its writer, and if she is lucky enough, her readers, too. Around us, so many objects abound to write about. Once a poet starts with a smallest, most trivial object, he shall discover that his pen will spill out what is most delicate or most majestic hidden inside him. Since the classics sometimes dealt with lofty subjects with a lofty language, a person with poetry in his soul may incline to emulate that. That is understandable. Poetry does that to a person: it enlarges the soul and gives it wings. Yet, to really soar, a poet needs to take off from the ground.
 
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Daily Cascade #1105380 added January 7, 2026 at 2:33pm
Restrictions: None
On Fears and Dreams
Prompt: "Don't be pushed around by the fears in your mind. Be led by the dreams in your heart." Roy T. Bennett Write about this quote in your Blog entry today.
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Tough command! Is it possible for anyone to push aside a fear totally and be led by dreams? After all, both fears and dreams have had a place in my life.
Surely, fears were there for my protection, but they could also become tyrants. And one fear just did that! In the same vein, taking a fear to the extreme is not healthy but just going after a wild dream is just as undoable, especially for me. I can, however, appreciate the quote for its effort in encouraging empowerment
And yes, any fear if not harnessed right, can become a tyrant within. This is because my mind or anyone else's is wired for survival from birth on. I have a good example in my own life of fear becoming that tyrant.
While I was growing up, at age eight, I started piano lessons, not as my choice but my mother's. Unfortunately, the first piano teacher, a very old man, was an overlord, persecutor, and bully all rolled into one. I feared him more than I'd ever fear God. Luckily for me, one day after a few months of my torture, my mother, hearing him yell, entered the room without knocking on the door and saw him bending over me and tapping on my hands with a wooden ruler. That became the last lesson with that teacher.
Yet, the fear lingered, and my next teachers were better and more understanding. Still, I never got over that earlier experience even though, years later, I got good enough to play in a small concert. Then, after I married, my husband, thinking he was doing me a grand favor, bought a fancy piano. He didn't know I was relieved to leave my old piano in my mother's home. Then, years later, when we retired and moved to Florida, I gave that piano to my older son. Thank God! I'm so relieved I don't have to touch it anymore.
In hindsight, if the first teacher had given me dreams instead of scaring me to death, just maybe I'd do better. Not much better though, because, as I said in the beginning, piano lessons weren't my choice but my mother's.
On the other hand, when I want to do something I really like, I can go after it full force with dreams and everything else I've got. This may be because the heart of a dreamer beats to the rhythm of curiosity and purpose.
I see dreams as the blueprints of our potential. When a musician finally plays her song or the writer finally writes the last word in a story or the ballerina takes a high leap, they’re not eliminating fear; they’re choosing growth.
Dreams, after all, are the quiet voices that say, “What if you tried? What if you soared?”
So one of the life lessons learned should be the understanding that setbacks are not failures but feedback, and that growth often lives on the edge of discomfort. When we choose to follow our hearts, we don’t eliminate fear, but we ride past it.
I think, later on, I was able to get over other fears much better than that of the piano-playing, and at least, some of the times, I didn't let any later fear to hold me back from answering the call of my dreams in many other areas.
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