letting go of what kept you holding on

When you're younger or youngish or just not staring mortality in the face I suppose you hold onto existence by the "eventually" and "maybe" and how some day something good will happen to you professionally, academically, financially, socially, whatever, you start to create fantasies early on where the novel you write gets published, or you become manager, or you save someone's life, or you retire at age 30 and travel, or you can sing, or dance, or solve an impossible equation, or fall in love, you'll figure it out. If it doesn't happen at age 18 it'll happen at 22, and then 28, and then 34, and before you know it nothing ever happened. We hold onto these things out of some malapportioned hope that they will happen and justify an existence otherwise marked by mundanity and suffering and dread. But perhaps these things drive the suffering because we keep wanting, hoping, begging for them to happen only for them to never come true. Perhaps the sooner we let go of the impossibilities that we think will make life better - the desire to be someone we're not, the things we hold out for and let drive us mad because we can't reach them - the easier it is to accept that life, as currently constructed, will never be profound.