What if...

What if someone gave you $250,000? What would you do with it? Start your own business? Buy that bed-and-breakfast? Quit your job and finally write that novel? Brooke, Caitlin, Jamie, and Anna, friends since college and all former English majors, have just been given the chance to find out. That's the premise of Beth Kendrick's Second Time Around, and the main reason I checked it out of the library.

This book is a fun, if somewhat predictable, read. But I think what I liked best about it is how it got me wondering what I would do if someone gave me $250,000 out of the blue. The practical, responsible side of me would probably invest the money, or put it towards retirement, maybe use it to replace my old car with a newer model or invest it in a condo, something sensible like that. But the dreamer in me would have a much more impractical plan. With $250,000 I could reinvent my life and finally do all those things I've always dreamed of doing "if I only had the money". I could rent a beach house for a year, take time off from work and learn to fly, learn French, travel the world, paint, write, move to Hawaii. The possibilities are endless; and it's those possibilities that make dreaming (and life!) worthwhile.

Henry David Thoreau wrote," If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."  I couldn't agree more.

Happy Dreaming!