Written during the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes uses this poem to vividly describe and explore the question of what happens when your dreams aren’t fulfilled. Langston Hughes alludes to the fact that there are several different possibilities that can occur when you put off accomplishing your dream.

“Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore– And then run?”

Your dreams can dry up like a raisin in the sun and you can simply give up on them. Or you can allow them to fester like a sore. When I think of these analogies, they remind me of something gross and disgusting. Who wants to eat a dried up raisin? Or look at a nasty sore? Nobody!

You see, your dreams start off as something so beautiful, like a rose, but if you don’t water them, if you don’t feed them, they shrivel and die.

“Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over– like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.”

Or they stink like rotten meat. What do you think of when you hear of rotten meat? Rotten meat stinks, it isn’t something that you want to be around, right? If your deferred dream stinks like rotten meat, people won’t want to hang around you. Your friends won’t want to call you and talk to you about your deferred dream. Imagine being in their shoes. Would you want to talk to your friend everyday about something they can try to change? How long will you stick around and try to be an inspiration to someone who doesn’t inspire you, or themselves?

“Or does it explode?”

What happens to dream deferred once it explodes? Maybe, when people can’t accomplish or don’t accomplish their dreams, they explode. When I think of a dream literally exploding inside of someone, I see the inability to attain the dream causing the person to be negative towards any and everything in life. They poison those that have dreams around them, they become intolerable to be around, and they are mean and angry people. Have you ever met someone that hates their job, or tells people what they can or can’t do, that their dreams are impossible? That they tried it and it didn’t work? Or what about the people that don’t get the promotion or job they wanted and they come back to the job and shoot everyone in sight! These are only SOME of the examples of what happens, when someone’s dream is unfulfilled, or explodes.

This may be a bit dramatic, but this is just to get you to thinking, what happens if you don’t follow your dreams. You don’t know WHAT you have to offer the world. How your dream can free someone or change someone’s life. Can you imagine if Thomas Edison hadn’t followed his dream to create electricity or light? We’d be sitting in the dark and our lives would be dramatically different. What if Harriet Tubman didn’t follow her dream of being free or setting others free? What if the Wright Brothers hadn’t followed their dreams of creating aircraft?

You are not only doing YOURSELF a disservice by not following your dreams, you may just being doing the world and future generations a disservice by not following your dreams.

Do you know that tomorrow isn’t promised to you? Can you imagine being in a car accident that completely disables you physically and mentally? Or being diagnosed with a rare disease that has no cure and a short lifespan? Or walking across the street and being hit by a car, and dying? There are so many freak accidents that happen every day and no matter what you do, you can never prepare for them.

So, why put off to tomorrow, what you can do today?

So here is today’s task.

JUST DO IT! I mean, what do you have to lose? Yea you could lose your house, your car, your credit… but wouldn’t you rather lose material things, than to lose yourself? Did you know that if you got them once you can get them again? I tell myself time and time again, if I have accomplished all that I have accomplished at the age of 27, things that people who are 60 and older have yet to accomplish, I can DEFINITELY do it again. If I can, more than likely, so can you!