The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.” – J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

On February 9, 1953, the Adventures of Superman premiered on television, four days after the theatrical release of Walt Disney’s Peter Pan. Five months later, in a maternity ward in Moline, Illinois, I also made my world debut. But it wasn’t until 1958, when I was 5 years old, that I first saw the re-released Peter Pan in a movie theatre with my father. That was the same year when the last episode of Superman graced our small, black-and-white television set, in our small home in Miami, Florida. What wasn’t “small” back then was the impact those two flying heroes had on the little boy I was during the 1950s. To illustrate my point: on one particular Halloween, my parents bought me a Superman costume, which I gleefully put on to go trick-or-treating that evening – and then continued to wear, under my play clothes, for most of the following year or so.

My earliest dreams were of me . . . flying. No doubt, my childhood fixation on Peter Pan and Superman had everything to do with that. What I find most interesting is that these nightly dreams were episodic in nature, much like the Adventures of Superman that I watched on television. It wasn’t like my dreams were a successive serial of one storyline, but more like individual episodes centered around my ability to fearlessly fly, and courageously “save the day.” (Mind you, by this age, I was also watching Mighty Mouse Playhouse every Saturday morning).

What I most remember about those dreams was the sheer confidence I possessed being this heroic little boy, flying around, while helping others. How strange that after three score years I can still recall how self-assuredly I would come to the rescue of different groups of people, and just know that I could handle whatever dire situation they were facing. While in my dream state, I knew no fear of others, and never doubted myself. My self-confidence in my superhuman abilities was unwavering, and I knew what it felt like, internally, to be invincible.

I probably stopped having my “flying dreams” by the time I was seven or eight years old. But I have never forgotten how self-assured they made me feel, both during the dreams, and upon awakening from them. At no time during the six decades since then have I ever known that level of self-confidence, or possessed that amount of belief in myself. My early childhood dreams of flying were later replaced, years later, by reoccurring dreams about tornadoes. Simply put, I went from having dreams about this little boy who was completely fearless and invulnerable, to dreaming about a young man who was forever fearful of these ever-approaching tornadoes, while feeling completely vulnerable to their immense destructive power. What’s sad is that my tornado dreams have revisited me, from time to time, ever since.

The only dream I have ever consciously created for myself has been my dream of being a writer. Ernest Hemingway was solely responsible for that dream. When I was 18 years old, I was stationed at a U.S. Army isolation post in West Germany. We had a small library on base, which became a personal sanctuary for me. It was there that I checked out a newly published collection of Hemingway’s short stories entitled The Nick Adams Stories. Naturally, the central character throughout each of the stories is Nick Adams, a young boy who grows up in northern Michigan, enlists in the Red Cross ambulance corps during World War One, and then returns home, desirous of becoming a writer. Because I, too, was a Michigan youth who ran off to join the Army, I could profoundly identify with many of the book’s stories – both with their settings, and with the character of Nick himself – and this book became the genesis of my desire to be a writer.

I wrote several short stories during the remaining time I served in the Army, and then returned to Michigan to attend college, with my electives gravitating towards courses in Literature and Philosophy. After three years of study, I decided it was time to buy a one-way ticket to France, where I would live the life of an American ex-patriot writer. Although Hemingway chose Paris as his writing “base of operations” in the 1920s, I was called to the French Riviera and settled in Nice. Like Hemingway, I, too, fell in with a modern-day “lost generation” of fellow ex-pats – my male friends being mostly American musicians, while English au pairs tended to comprise my female dating pool. I was 23 years old, in love, living in the Garden of Eden, and having the time of my life. What I wasn’t doing . . . was writing.

Over the following four decades, I accumulated two foot lockers full of unfinished manuscripts of novels, short stories, stage plays and screenplays, along with hundreds of assorted cocktail napkins and pieces of scrap paper with story ideas scribbled on them. Although, during college, I did get a few of my poems published, and, many years later, completed a screenplay, what I didn’t have in my writing “resume” was a published manuscript. Obviously, my dream of being a writer was to be a published writer – to have actual books with my name on the covers and spines, to receive residual checks from my publisher, and to do book signings in book stores all around the world.

In the same way that I stopped having flying dreams at a certain age, I now realize that my dreams of being a writer were over the very moment I started to doubt my ability to write. The perfectionist that I was all those years created so much self-doubt within me, it’s no wonder that I never completed any of my literary works. In my mind, I was afraid that my writing could never measure up to Hemingway, the source of my inspiration. How sad that we do that to ourselves. How tragic that we allow fear and self-doubt to destroy our dreams. Yet many of us do just that. But, what I have learned is that we have it within us to change our “stinking thinking” and follow through on our lifelong goals and dreams.

Three years ago, when I published my first book, The Pono Principle, my writing dream finally came true. All I needed to do was to go deep within myself, and rediscover that confident, self-assured little boy I once was, who could fly and help other people. Since that child and I still share the same Being, an identical True Nature, that “flying hero” that was me as a child still resides in my person, and so does his self-confidence and courage. All I have to do is beckon it again. And, once equipped with that rediscovered, and resurrected, self-confidence (which was just lying dormant for many years), I was able to complete my book, publish it, receive residual checks for it, and sign many copies of it over the past three years.

The source of all my fears, over a lifetime, have always been self-manufactured – whenever I forget who I truly am, or what I am capable of accomplishing. The best of me is not what lies on the exterior of my person, or in the rat trap of my thinking. The beauty of an oyster does not lie in its outward appearance; only within its crusty, protective shell can its true treasure be found. Only by journeying within, to the center of my being, have I ever been able to discover the core of my True Self, where all of my strength, self-confidence, and true purpose, reside.

Only there have I found the ability to write, and to fly again.