Making room for a new vision

That’s what it comes down to, that feeling when you seem like you’ve lost your way on a project, on a career track, on the life you’d always imagined. Sometimes it falls apart. Sometimes it’s insanity to keep clinging to a vision, despite all of the sacrifices you’ve made to get this far — despite all of the myths about perseverance, denying the haters, defying the odds, seeing what others don’t, staying the course, staying true, etc.

People say that you always know in your “heart of hearts” when it’s time to let go of something, but is that just something we tell ourselves? Do we narrate backwards, infusing blind guesses we made in the past with meaning we create in the present? We like to think we had it planned out all along, but maybe that’s just the cognitive bias talking.

Either way, when a road ends, you find a new one. Perhaps you really weren’t on the right road to begin with, or perhaps you needed to travel as far as you could down that one to get on this one. Perhaps finding new purpose is just a matter of stripping away the trappings you thought you once needed to travel your path – ridding yourself of all the baggage, the faulty thinking, the specific imagery of success. Recovering the naked goal, or something along those lines.

When you’re switching paths it can feel like traversing a narrow foot-pass along the side of a mountain – a matter of life and death – but there’s something important that happens in these stark moments. You surprise yourself with audacity and resilience. You take a leap. You move on. You are stronger for having faced it. You wouldn’t be the same without it.

Or at least that’s what you tell yourself.

What is it time for you to let go of? How are you getting to where you want to go?

Ryan Melsom has a PhD in literary studies and has spent over twenty years working in communications, marketing, web design, and writing. His second book Spendshift: 100 Lazy Hacks to Rock Your Finances is now available on Amazon. For more by Ryan, follow him on Twitter @lintropy, or visit his Facebook page.