There’s a house that I like to drive past when I’m on my way home from the grocery store. It’s in a quiet neighborhood, lush with trees and well-established foliage, and it sits on a large corner lot tucked away from the only slightly more busy streets around it. The home is a sprawling, single-story French Normandy, and I want to buy it someday.

I was thinking earlier today about the whole, “If you build it, they will come” quote. If I dream it, will it eventually be mine? I tend to think so.

I don’t believe the home will be put on the market anytime soon. But if it was, I may need to fight their children for it — or maybe not, as I’m not 100% sure whether they have kids. That said, while their USC house and garden flags may indicate that one of the owners is a graduate of said university, I think it’s moreso the doing of a son, daughter, or both.

The home won’t be purchased anytime soon. If it was listed tomorrow, the thing has a value of around $900K, as I recently found out by looking it up online (just slightly out of my price range)…so I’d need to let someone else purchase it, then stalk (not literally, natch) its next owner. The thought of its current owners selling to someone else besides me makes me cringe. Would it still have its manicured, maintained charm? Would they paint it? Would they add on? Tear it down? Care for it? Would it remain a home, or get down-graded to a house? Oh, the worry.

For me, the power of imagining something and exercising a sort of patient focus as I plod towards it, one foot in front of the other, day after day, is a rewarding journey. Even if something is almost within reach and the tides turn, something else — usually better — is just around the corner. I find that life has a funny way of allowing that to happen, so long as we stick to our dreams.

Today I am thankful for the things in life which give us focus and which fan the fires of resolve to keep our dreams in our sights. Whether big or small, distant or close, the magic of a dream tempered by the faithfulness to our desire for achieving it, can lead us on the most amazing journey.