SOMETIMES DREAMS HAVE TO CHANGE.

It’s a difficult truth that progress in life can require that we know when to let go of one dream or goal and exchange it for a new one. You can benefit from what you learned or experienced in pursuit of something even if you never got to what you thought was the end goal.

I’m not a psychologist or a life coach, but I’ve learned through painful personal experience that life is a continual process of learning about yourself and figuring out what dreams and goals will give you happiness, or make your life better in some way. It could be a goal of getting through an hour without crying or having a healthy breakfast, walking a mile, running a marathon, taking a road trip, or finding out something you always wanted to know. There are an infinite number of dreams and goals in the world.

You can’t have a billion simultaneous dreams and goals, or you will totally stress yourself out. Giving up or setting aside old ones is not a sign of failure. Life is made up of so many continually changing factors that it would be unreasonable if your motivations didn’t change as well. You change, and so should your dreams.

Your dreams can serve a very important purpose in your life. They can give you direction and motivation, hope and happiness. But they aren’t all supposed to reach the end you think you want them to reach. They don’t all last forever, just like all friendships don’t last forever, and most jobs or careers don’t last forever.

If your dream no longer gives you the fire to reach for it then it’s probably time to re-evaluate it completely. Don’t desperately clutch onto it because you think you have to. If it drains you mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, or ethically then it’s not really a dream anymore, it’s a bad habit.

We tend to think of life as having a linear progression. By that I mean, we start at point A, which is when we are born, and progress along a certain path until we get to point Z, when we die. We realize that unforeseen things happen to disrupt the path, but still tend to think of it as a straight line.

Of course, it’s anything but that. Sometimes we are pulled in new directions that just kind of happen organically in life. Sometimes we make conscious decisions and take definitive action to pursue a path or change our path. The dreams we have often exist outside real-world rules and conventions. I have lost a lot of dreams in my life.

As you may know, I’m pursuing my dreams of writing fiction. It’s a dream I had a very long time and thought I’d given up on – but it turns out that I hadn’t, not really. Sometimes timelines just change.

I want to take a moment and make sure to state that I’m not one of those people who believe ‘everything happens for a reason.’ I can’t rationalize that with the fact that good people and innocent little children get painfully ill, suffer and die, or are murdered. That being said, I do accept the fact that some things happen for a reason, even though we might not realize it at the time. Sometimes when things seem to be completely falling apart, in the bigger picture of our life, things are actually falling into place.

Unfortunately, letting go of a dream can feel like giving up, and that’s definitely not something that feels good.

I’d really love it if you would share your experiences or thoughts with me.