Developing a dream muscle

I’m obsessed with Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, and I’m especially obsessed with this idea:

“… the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”

Maybe it sounds like a bit poetic woo-woo, but it makes sense: What we pay attention to shapes what we see. What we see frames our perception of the world. Our perceptions shape our experience.

If you add dreams to the mix, I think the basic idea still holds. I also like Gay’s idea of a “delight muscle,” and have been thinking about what would be involved in developing a dream muscle. We can access and experience our dreams, but we have to pay attention to them first. And maybe paying attention—to things big and small, over and over everyday—is how this muscle gets built.

I love this because it’s so practical.