My mom used to share with me a few wise sayings about wishes. The first one was ‘if wishes were horses, beggars would ride”. This basically means that if you could accomplish something by simply wishing for it, life would be so easy.
The second one was, ‘Don’t wish your life away’. These two sayings go hand-in-hand. If all you are doing is sitting around wishing, your life probably doesn’t have much value. And if you truly believe you could have everything you ever wanted just by making a wish, then I’ll add another old saying you need to hear – ‘That dog just doesn’t hunt.’
I will say that I have made a lot of wishes in my time. Some of them miraculously came true. Around here, we call that ‘by the Grace of God’, because it was the only way those wishes even had a chance.
Others came true, but it was only after a lot of work to make them happen. And still others have long since blown away on the breath it took to make them. Kinda like making a wish and blowing on Dandelion fluff.
There are one or two wishes I have that are still standing – like the one I’ve had ever since we moved to the farm. But it involves the Budweiser Company pulling up in my driveway with two of their Clydesdales, and the driver telling me the CEO of Budweiser heard how much I wanted those horses, so he decided to just give me two of them. Including the cost of delivery, all the tackle, and a year’s worth of food. Now just how quickly do you think that wish will come true?
Some of my wishes I have been very grateful never came true. In that case, I was wishing bigger than my britches, and in hindsight, I now know it wasn’t something that would have been a good fit for me in the long run.
But good, bad, indifferent, or outrageous, wishes are still a good thing. A wish, when boiled down, are things we believe may be a good thing for us to have or do. The key is to know which ones are a whim, which ones may have merit, and which ones are so far-fetched it’s laughable. Those Budweiser Clydesdales fall into that category, for sure.
We have all heard the phrase ‘Be careful what you wish for”. There are pros and cons to wishes. Folks who start out wishing to win the lottery – and then actually do, often discover there are so many headaches to winning they begin to wish they hadn’t. Some wishes find us in relationships that are unhealthy or unstable.
If your wishes are granted easily, and frequently, you could become complacent, lazy, and even begin to feel somewhat deserving or entitled. If you depend too heavily on wishes, you can become sorely disappointed with life, and feel as if you aren’t worthy, or life isn’t treating you fairly when those wishes aren’t granted.
Look at wishes as that two-sided coin. On one side, you can think of having a wish granted as winning. We all love to win at something.
If one side is winning, the other side would be losing. If your wishes are granted too easily, you lose out on the sense of accomplishment of working hard for what you want.
It may be that when your wish is granted, reality hits, you discover your fulfilled wish causes more problems than solutions, and you find yourself wishing for the exact opposite.
But don’t give up on wishing altogether. Sometimes, wishing may actually be a benefit.
For years, before the Country Boy and I ever decided to move to the farm, we dreamed and wished and hoped to buy property on a nearby lake. He loves to hunt and fish; I loved the idea of a slower pace and just being on the water. Both of us wanted to move out of the congestion of the city.
Finally, we decided to start looking in earnest. It didn’t take us long to find that lake property around here is very hard to come by. What was available had extreme differences. The ones we could afford were small, cramped, and one had a rusted-out school bus in the center, and the entire (and very small) yard had more trash than grass. Others were three to five times more than the tip top of what we could afford.
Eventually, the disappointment had us almost giving up. While in the grocery store, I saw one of those free local Real Estate magazines. Thinking there may be a chance in there, I flipped through it while I was in line. One ad caught my attention – it was land, not lake, but it looked interesting. I took it home, showed the Country Boy, and then we both got to wondering.
Long story short, we looked at that property, but it didn’t work out. However, in doing our research, we called the Land Bank to see if we could get a loan. Our friend Jon worked there, and he said yes we could – but if that property didn’t work out, he knew of another one. Which is when our wish for lake property started to shift and began to move forward.
When we first decided to place an offer on this farm, I sat outside my city house and wondered if we were making the right decision. Oh, we both wanted it, thought it would be the answer to our prayers, and were wishing beyond hope they would accept our offer – which admittedly was well below the asking price.
But I wondered if my glasses were rose colored. I knew there would be a tremendous amount of work to get it into shape. I had never lived on a farm, raised anything larger than a Labrador Retriever, and had no clue exactly how much work would be required.
But our wish to move away from the city did come true. Just not in the way we initially planned it. It wasn’t long before I discovered how much responsibility, hard work, late nights, and lack of sleep my wish actually cost. But it is a price I found I will gladly pay, as even with the difficulties, there are so many benefits and blessings that it is well worth the payments.
But there have been some wishes I’ve had that have come true, and my only wish now is that I could change the outcome. One wish was to expand our herd of cows. We finally got the opportunity and spent our hard-earned money on a cow before we did our research. This cow ended up having Johnes disease – a contagious, chronic, and fatal condition. Fortunately, we adhere to the ‘isolation theory’, which means keeping any new animal isolated from others until they prove healthy. A month later, the cow and our money was gone, with the added expense of vet bills.
Thinking about that wish causes me to apply that other old saying – “Be careful what you wish for”. Long before you wish for anything, you may want to weigh the cost. It may be a monetary cost, or the price of time, labor, or having to give something else up in order to have what you wish for.
And if you weigh the costs and decide you can afford it, then it’s time to turn those wishes into dreams, and those dreams into a plan, and then work hard to make those wishes a reality.
I wouldn’t trade my wish to move out of the city and have the room to live a Simple Life easily. But now, long before I blow on that dandelion, I think long and hard about what I am wishing for.
And as for those Clydesdales? I know almost right down to the blade of grass they would eat what it would cost to have them. I also know that with our luck, those horses would be offloaded from the trailer and probably step in a hole an hour later and break their legs. But at the same time, I also can’t say I would turn the truck and trailer around with a note to the Budweiser CEO that says, ‘Thanks for the offer, but these babies are better off with you.’
Are you wishing for something that sounds bigger, better, greater than what you have now? Are you wishing you could ride? Before you send that wish out into the air, make sure you like horses first. And you may also want to check to see if that dog of yours is out hunting, or fast asleep in the shade of the porch.
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