The past year has been incredibly long and frustrating and grief-filled and silent.

But new opportunities and a fresh dose of hope are on the horizon. New songs are in the near future.

I have an appointment for a collaborative songwriting session on Wednesday. I’ve never written with this musician before, so I have no idea if we’ll write a great song, a bad song, or no song at all. What excites me is the opportunity, the chance, to write again . . . to do what I love to do.

While I’m grateful for and cautiously optimistic about the future, I have to admit I’m not quite done grieving the former things: the old dream. It’s hard to find the balance between grief and goodness. Between letting go and reaching for something new.

I won’t deny the gift in front of me by staying stuck in grief, but to accept it feels like a bit like betrayal, an abandonment of dreams I treasured for so long.

* * * * * 

Maybe we don’t realize how much our dreams mean to us until we’re stripped of the chance to see them fulfilled. Maybe the purpose of loss is to show us what was really important all along, what we should’ve fought to keep. Maybe it teaches us to hold close the dreams we treasure and not take for granted a single step of the journey.

Here’s to taking an unexpected path . . .