The Graveyard of Someday

Have you ever told yourself “Someday I’ll get around to it”?

Maybe you were thinking about telling your partner how much they meant to you. Maybe you were trying to plan a romantic get-away. Or break that habit you’ve got of losing your temper and starting an argument.

Maybe you’ve watched your relationship slowly slide downhill as negative tension started to build between you and your partner from the stresses of life. Maybe your relationship is just barely hanging on by a thread now as you stare down into a dark pit of seeming hopelessness.

Or worse, maybe that spark, that sizzle of affection and love, just started fading away, and every day just seems like the passion in your relationship is a little dimmer than the day before. How long before it’s completely gone, smothered to death by a pattern of passivity and the inertia of inaction?

**And you’ve told yourself, “Someday I’ll take care of that.”**

I think we’ve all been there at one point or another in life.

Everyone is busy these days. Between work, a long commute, all the chores (let’s face it dinner isn’t going to cook itself), and everything else, it can sometimes feel like you’re just treading water. Completely unable to get past everything you have to do to just “get by” in order to get to all the things you know you should do.

So you tell yourself, “Someday I’ll get around to it.”

Then you turn back to all those things that keep you from doing what you need in order to enjoy that relationship with your partner, get in shape, or live a life you can truly be passionate about.

Maybe you feel guilty about it every time you look in your partner’s eyes, only to see her slipping away from you, and you just know that things have to change.

And You’re Absolutely Right!

Things do need to change. If you don’t re-prioritize them, your life and your relationship will just keep heading down the road they’re already going down.

And do you know where that road leads?

It’s where all of the best intentions go to die when no one ever took the time to act on them.

We just end up putting things off day after day, month after month, until the years roll by and we end up looking back on a lifetime of painful excuses and wonder what could have been.

“Could I have saved the relationship?”
“Could I have stopped that breakup?”
“Could we have been happy together?”
“Could my life have been completely different than it is now?”

It’s not a place that I think you want to be.

When we’re young, we’re used to having all the opportunities in the world.

We’re used to those graduation speeches where people tell us that we are the future of the world. They play songs like “The Impossible Dream” from Man of la Mancha and they tell us that we can be anything that we want to be.

**And it’s true that you really can.**

You can be anything, but you can’t be everything.

Life can be a painful process of choosing what you become. Letting go of some opportunities so that we can pursue others.

The question is which opportunities have you chosen for your life?

It’s easy to hold all the possibilities in the back of your mind and believe that someday you’ll make that decision to turn your relationship around, follow your heart and do work you’re passionate about, or step into your best self and truly love your life.

But every second that goes by where you put your dreams on hold and refuse to act on them, they are slowly dying.

Moment by moment, your relationship slips away unless you give it the attention it needs to thrive.

And it can only live on life support for so long before it ends up in the Graveyard of Someday.

Think of all the opportunities you’ve let slip by in your life.

All those people in your past who’ve shown interest in you, but you were too scared, shy, or whatever to act. Think of all the relationships that could have been born from taking the small action of standing up and saying “Hey I like you too. Are you free for coffee?”

All of those times, you’ve laid there in bed, watching your partner sob herself to sleep, and for a brief moment you felt like opening up and having a real conversation with her, laying it all out on the table and just being honest, but you didn’t, and even though you both went to sleep in the same bed that night, you couldn’t have felt further away from her.

All of those times when you had another one of “those” fights where he stormed out of the room and, as you’re wiping the tears from your eyes, you thought, “you know what, he was right.” But you didn’t tell him, you didn’t apologize, due to pride or fear or some other stupid thing, and he never came back.

What could have come from taking a different path?

You can’t change the past, but right now, you’re creating the life that you’ll look back on days, months, and years from now.

The question is, are you living a life that you’ll be happy to look back on, or are you letting everything drift down that lonely and dark road to the Graveyard of Someday?