Telescope

Some endings land harder than their visible size should allow, and it took me a long time to understand why.

This pattern is selective. Most people, ideas, and opportunities do not trigger it. I can appreciate them, assess them, and let them remain what they are.

It begins when something appears unusually aligned, consequential, or full of possibility. In those moments, vision starts working before reality has had enough time to establish itself.

This is the dark side of optimism. I often become so absorbed in the meaning, momentum, and possibilities.

When an opportunity passes, a project loses momentum, a role fades away, a payment does not arrive, or a connection ends, the practical consequences can be significant. As a founder building without much financial or institutional cushion, a delayed invoice, lost opportunity, or abandoned project can affect what I am able to fund, which commitments I can sustain, and how long I can keep working.

It happens for me with ideas I originate and also with opportunities other people bring to me.

I can be participating in the actual conversation, attending the meeting, or actively doing the work while simultaneously assembling a version of my life that hasn't materialized yet.

Often, I am already contributing before anyone has formalized the commitment. I am making introductions, preparing materials, solving problems, offering ideas, and building trust. The effort is real, even when the future around it remains uncertain.

A promising introduction becomes a lasting partnership. A possible role becomes a life in another city. An early idea acquires a team, a building, and years of consequence. A new connection becomes a place of trust and belonging.

These projections are not random. Each begins with something real: a credible signal, an unusual alignment, a moment of recognition, or evidence of genuine potential. I may then reinforce that signal with actual effort.

That is precisely what can make imagination difficult to distinguish from progress.

The problem begins when a credible signal becomes the complete story.

Optimism fills the unknown spaces with the most generous outcome. I can then become attached to that untouched future and start comparing what exists with the most complete version of it that I can imagine. My most consistent driver is mortality. I think to my self, I am alive, right now and right now is all I have. So It drives me to keep building.

I can look at people and possibilities the way someone looks through a telescope: enormous magnification, enormous distance, and almost no awareness of the room I am standing in.

When part of me is living in what something could become, I am not fully inside what it is. A meaningful conversation, a promising meeting, or an encouraging early result can become evidence for the future instead of an experience complete in itself.

I often do not notice this while it is happening. By the time I do, the moment has already passed.

It can also distort how I read the situation I am actually in. I track the trajectory instead of the state.

Is this heading somewhere? Is it accelerating? Does it resemble the version I have built?

The more immediate questions are less exciting and more important:

What has actually happened? What has actually been offered? What has been committed, resourced, repeated, or sustained? Is this good now, at its current size?

The weight of an ending is not determined only by what existed. It is also shaped by how much of my future I had placed inside it.

Sometimes an opportunity, project, place, or connection stops being one possibility among many and becomes the doorway into the life I have begun to imagine.

When it closes, I do not only lose the door. I lose the trust I had imagined holding on to.

That is when I can struggle to let go. So i use media to escape. I listen to music, freestyle, or watch movies or TV shows.

At other times, I can let go with surprising ease. Not because it mattered less, but because of circumstance, timing, and the universe.

Vision tells me what could exist.

Optimism gives me the energy to move toward it.

Reality tells me what has actually been offered, resourced, reciprocated, repeated, or sustained.

my issue is when the vision and optimism start debating what only time can tell.

Potential can be real. Some connections, ideas, places, and openings genuinely contain more promise than others. Seeing what could exist is part of how I build. I won't trick myself out of recognizing that.

Potential and projection can arrive so closely together that I mistake one for evidence of the other. Possibility feels like perception. Projection arrives at such high resolution that it resembles memory.

I can understand parts deeply and still misunderstand what that understanding means for the connection. I can recognize genuine value in an opportunity and still be wrong about its probability, timing, cost, conditions, or whether anyone else intends to build it with me.

Insight is not alignment.

Potential is not commitment.

Effort is not agreement.

I have sometimes treated my ability to see potential, and my willingness to work toward it, as evidence that it would materialize.

That is the other thing about a telescope. It can resolve the object beautifully but only from afar.

Asking what is true rather than where everything is heading.

Separating what has happened from everything I have imagined it leading to.

Letting vision propose and reality verify.

Treating optimism as fuel rather than evidence.

Distinguishing work I have chosen to contribute from commitments other people have actually made.

Letting a connection, opportunity, project, or place remain the size it currently is rather than the size it might eventually reach.

Waiting for reciprocity, commitment, resources, payment, and repeated action before promoting a possibility into a plan.

And when something ends, grieving the two losses separately.

First, what actually existed: the work, the role, the project, the place, the path, or the connection. Honestly and in proportion.

Then the imagined life. That deserves acknowledgment too, but I now distinguish what was is genuinely taking shape from my imagination.

I most likely will not become less visionary or less optimistic. Those qualities are part of how I build, and many real things begin as futures held in someone’s mind before anyone else can see them.

People deserve to be met at the scale of what they have actually offered and Opportunities deserve to be judged by their real conditions.

Projects deserve the chance to become themselves instead of being measured only against the perfected version I imagined at the beginning.

I can honor possibility without treating it as a promise.

I can contribute generously without confusing my contribution with a shared commitment.

I can move toward the future without pretending it has already arrived.

That is the balance I am learning: keeping the future open without moving into it before it exists.