The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is:
What’s your biggest dream?

I guess I’ve actually achieved (or am in the process of achieving) a number of my dreams. With one obvious and clear exception.

From an early age, I’ve had a number of dreams, as probably most people have. I dreamt I’d live on a sailboat, I dreamt I’d be an author, I dreamt I’d go to Africa.

I dreamt I’d have adventures.

Someone in a video I was watching today said it’s not an adventure until something goes wrong.

Looking at those first three dreams, I’ve completed them at least symbolically if not exactly how I imagined. I went to Namibia in the end of December of 2007, and stayed until October 2009, as a volunteer teacher in a secondary school. I worked for an educational charity in Johannesburg, South Africa from October 2009 to May 2012. Things went wrong, adventures were had.

Toward the end of my time in Africa, I took a sailing course off of Capetown. When I went back to Canada, I was stressed and needed to unwind. I bought a sailboat and lived by myself for four months. Things went wrong, usually the motor dying when it was impractical to hoist a sail, adventures were had.

In 2015, short stories of mine started getting bought by publishers. By 2018, I’d made it into an anthology from a British publisher that distributed worldwide. I could walk into a bookstore in Kuala Lumpur and see the anthology on the shelf, my story and name in the index.

In 2022, my first short story collection came out. Things went wrong, like the not-final draft getting uploaded to the publisher first, adventures were had.

Next month, my first full-length novel is supposed to come out, but things are going very wrong, as developmental edits are muddying the story, not clearing it up, and adventures are being had.

But at the top, I said there was “one obvious and clear exception.”

In 1969, Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. Along with half the planet, five-year-old me watched with awe. A few years later, I discovered Star Trek in reruns on TV, and was hooked. Just like Neil and Spock, I was going to be an astronaut!

That never happened, and never would have, for a number of reasons: I have a couple of medical conditions that could be fatal in high-G situations; my math skills aren’t good enough; and now, in 2026, I’m far too old.

So the only way I can accomplish my big dream is to visit strange new worlds on our Earth, be it the Serengeti, the Great Barrier Reef, or just, you know, Hong Kong at night. I can be an explorer in my little waterways aboard a 26-foot sailboat. I can use my imagination as a writer to envision space exploration.

I can dream dreams.