A: Read this article for some comforting and inspiring ideas:
My summary of the article
Missing out on a cherished goal is excruciatingly painful.
Not only have we missed out on the important goal we’ve set our heart on, but we also have to cope with the loss of our hoped-for “new self” that would have come with our achieving our goal.
For instance, a woman with the goal of becoming a mother loses her hoped-for new self as “mother” the day she hears she cannot have children.
The father who hears his baby son has Down’s Syndrome loses his future self as the dad who was going to teach his son football and have deep philosophical conversations with him one day.
The same happens when we miss out on any cherished goal, such as the break-up of a relationship we thought was “the one”, or the failure of a business idea, or the collapse of an investment that was going to set us up for retirement.
We need time to process what’s happened.
Failing a cherished goal means somehow we have to accommodate the failure into our life. This is truly challenging: We have to somehow make sense of our new life without our cherished goal. We have to come up with replacement cherished goals and re-prioritize existing goals.
This adjustment takes time. It’s important to give ourselves that time to process all we have lost. The better we process it, the more we can learn from it.
We can learn a lot from loss and the suffering it brings.
Handled the right way, the loss of the cherished goal helps us develop insight. We learn to find meaning in our failure and suffering. In the process, we grow into richer, more insightful and complex human beings.
Without life’s unwanted surprise twists, we’d live perfectly routine, predictable existences–with little growth happening as a result.
In time, we may even feel gratitude for the way things have turned out. We may realize that, although we have lost one possible self, we ended up with another– possibly even better–self.
Loss and suffering teaches us equanimity: we have to accept life is unpredictable and that the gods of fate won’t always give us what we want, no matter how much we want it or how hard try.
Missing out on a cherished goal also can teach us that we are robust enough to handle life’s nasty surprises. It’s not the nasty surprises that do us in, but rather our inability to cope with them.
If we can’t handle the loss, bad things may happen.
If we can’t rise above our loss, then we’ve let ourselves be crushed by a sense of entitlement. We’ve become stuck in thinking that we are entitled to achieve our cherished goal and we feel deeply resentful that we did not get our expectations met.
We get locked into “if only” thinking: “There were so many things I could have achieved if only. . .”
If we can’t rise above our loss, we may lose some of our trust in life and other people and lose our courage to try again for new cherished goals. We may come to believe all our cherished goals will blow up on us and tell ourselves:
“Striving hard for tough goals isn’t worth it. Life’s too unpredictable. I had better not to try as failing hurts too much.”
A question to ask yourself, once you’ve had enough time to process your loss:
“If I had my time over again, would I still want to keep this unexpected experience — or would I prefer to skip it entirely”
Hopefully, for most of your experiences, your answer will be:
“I’m glad I had this experience. If I had my time over again, I would change almost nothing.”
Here’s a heart-warming account from someone who dealt well with her loss.
This mother of a Down’s Syndrome child explains how she has matured as a person from having to deal with her loss of her cherished dream (King and Hicks, 2006, p 133):
“I see myself on an exciting journey. I like who I am. I have many areas that need work but for the most part I’m present and attentive to my needs and dreads and goals. . . . I am finding that giving is truly more satisfying than receiving. I have had a challenge in accepting my son’s Down’s Syndrome. It’s taken time but unconditional love and acceptance are truly there. . .I want to work within the community to be an agent of change. We all have a time of being a caregiver — to our children or parents, or someone. I want to offer. . . tools for people to find their own balance and peace. . . I am quite selfish by nature: My son has opened that perspective — a new window for loving and caring now exists for me. I’m proud that I have taken responsibility for my own growth.”
In a nutshell, if you experience the loss of a cherished goal, remember these four things:
- Spend time visiting your loss to learn from it and extract all the good you can. But don’t let yourself get bitter or stuck, longing for what could have been.
- Now move on. Throw yourself into new cherished goals.
- Remember that life won’t always give you what you want, but, nevertheless, you must stay optimistic and keep trying really hard for the things that matter.
- Embrace life’s rich complexity and unpredictability. This way, you’ll get properly tested and get to discover who you really are.
“Life is a work of art, probably the greatest one we produce.” (Bruner)
