It's the Journey and not the Destination

I have to be reminded of this sage advice every once in a while (luckily I do get reminded!) My presumed "destination" has changed too many times in the last year-and-a-half so that there doesn’t seem to be much sense worrying about it. I guess we like to think of life as all packaged up for us - we can see where we started, where we are, and presumably where we are going to end up. It's not until there are drastic and unexpected changes along the way that we're "surprised" to find that the future isn't as forecast.

I guess this is another attachment for folks to get over in their grieving - that things didn't go as planned and that it's time to imagine new futures. I don't know who would be worse off - someone who wouldn't let go of the "old future" they had imagined, or someone who gave up on imaging any future. I could see giving up on the future as a serious option. For some folks it's either too scary to imagine the changes they need to make to achieve a new future, or it's too scary to think that they would imagine a new future and then lose it as well.

As I've been dating and meeting new people I've had occasion to come across folks who have had experience with either cancer or some other serious illness. More than once the thought has flashed through my mind "what if I got to know this person, developed a relationship - then they became ill, battled a disease, and I lost them?" I've come to expect this as a natural thought process for me to experience and not something to be scared of. As with other fears or doubts that occasionally run through my head I just acknowledge that they're OK to have but I don’t have to run my life by them.