If you have ever wondered how it feels to be a unicorn, you have to look no farther than my faithfully crazy friend Nicole. After I dressed up a Piggy-the-Pig for her to keep her laughing and smiling during her Ironman Texas last month, she one-upped me for my race day with a stuffed unicorn on her head.
Transported from Virginia to France and tied secure with a pink bow underneath her chin, my Ironman unicorn cheered with pride and met hundreds of curious on-lookers. Ten hours into my race, delusional and exhausted from the Mediterranean heat and my little bike ride through the Alps, when I first saw Nicole I was barely able to muster a smile. Inside I was laughing, outside, I just kept running, pushing forward to keep my body moving and my mind focused on finishing. Nicole chose the perfect creature to encourage me, for unicorns symbolize hope and dreams, the exact same thing I was out chasing to the finish that day of my Ironman in Nice. Bruce Coville once said, that “wherever they may have come from, and wherever they may have gone, unicorns live inside the true believer’s heart. Which means that as long as we can dream, there will be unicorns.”
Somewhere as adults we lose our ability to dream. We forget the freedom of fantasy and imagination. We forget how to hope. This amnesia steals more than just our innocence from us, it steals our ability to believe in ourselves and in our limitless potential. If you knew that you could do anything in this world, and be anything you wanted to be, what would you do? Belief takes hope, so hope your way into the life that you have always dreamed of and never let anyone tell you that a unicorn doesn’t exist, for I have seen one myself.
