It’s hard to nurture what’s alive when you water dead flowers

I have trouble giving up on people.

It’s not just people, though. It’s more accurate to say I have trouble giving up on whatever fantasy of the future that I’ve created in my mind. Sometimes that involves people. Sometimes it’s an achievement I’ve set my heart on. It can be any fantasy of what I think my life is going to look like.

I fall in love with my fantasies, I suppose. My life will be perfect when I make this thing happen. Everything will be perfect when this woman loves me and we live happily ever after.

And when I figure out that I’ve been chasing the wrong thing, I have trouble letting go of it. I have trouble saying that this thing is never going to happen. It’s hard for me to admit that maybe the thing I’ve been chasing was never good for me anyway.

When I stubbornly cling to dreams that are already dead, I sometimes allow myself to miss better opportunities. I sometimes mope so much about what I can’t have — even something I’ve decided isn’t good for me — that I miss better choices.

It’s been very difficult for me to stop watering dead flowers.

The strange thing is that I usually know better.

If a friend came to me and described the same situation, I could often see the answer immediately. I’d tell him that some relationships aren’t meant to work. I’d tell him that some goals are worth abandoning. I’d tell him that not every dream deserves to survive forever.

But it’s easier to recognize reality when you’re standing outside the story.

When it’s my own story, I become attached to the version of the future I’ve imagined. I don’t just want a particular outcome. I start building an entire life around it in my mind.

I imagine conversations that haven’t happened yet. I imagine experiences that don’t exist. I imagine a future that feels so vivid and so appealing that it begins to feel real. Even inevitable.

Then reality shows up with inconvenient facts.

The woman who said she wanted me suddenly doesn’t choose me.

An opportunity disappears. Or maybe it was never really the opportunity I thought it was.

Or maybe a plan that I see building something great simply doesn’t work.

The thing I’ve been chasing turns out to be something entirely different than I thought it was.

At that point, a healthy person adjusts course and moves on. I tend to stand there looking at the dead dream — holding the watering can.

Maybe if I try a little harder.

Maybe if I’m more patient.

Maybe if I refuse to give up.

Sometimes persistence is a virtue. Sometimes it isn’t.

One of the most difficult lessons I’ve had to learn is that determination and denial can look remarkably similar from the inside. Both involve refusing to quit. Both involve continuing despite setbacks. Both involve believing things will improve.

The difference is that determination is attached to reality. Denial is attached to fantasy.

The problem isn’t that dead flowers refuse to bloom. The problem is that while I’m staring at them, life keeps happening somewhere else.

Opportunities appear and disappear.

People enter and leave our lives.

New possibilities emerge.

And if I’m obsessed with what I’ve lost, I may never notice what I’ve been given. I may never notice that other people and other opportunities are asking for permission to come into my life.

I’ve spent enough years on Earth to recognize that some of the things I once desperately wanted would have made me miserable. I can look back on things I’ve wanted with all my heart — especially romantic relationships — and realize that getting what I wanted would have been the worst thing in the world for me.

At the time I was doubling down on dead flowers, I couldn’t see that.

I thought I was mourning the loss of happiness. In reality, I was mourning the loss of an illusion. The future I imagined wasn’t being taken away from me. It never existed in the first place.

That’s what makes letting go so difficult.

We’re not giving up something real. We’re giving up something that felt real.

We’re burying a future that lived entirely in our own imagination.

And yet there comes a point when we have to stop watering dead flowers.

Not because we’re cynical.

Not because we’re bitter.

Not because we no longer care.

We stop because life is too short to spend it mourning futures that will never arrive.

There are still living things around us. There are still people to love. There are still opportunities worth pursuing. There are still flowers capable of blooming.

But it’s hard to nurture what’s alive when we keep pouring all of our attention into things that died long ago.

I know that.

I just don’t always remember it.