<em>"What do you do when your dreams come true and it's not quite what you planned?"
</em><strong>-- DON HENLEY</strong>

There's an implication here that I find really interesting and always have, that we dream of our future when we're young and then live with those dreams for the rest of our life.

[caption id="attachment_512" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Texas sky"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Texas-106.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-512" title="Texas 106" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Texas-106-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" /></a>[/caption]

That's all very well and good, but if I had stayed with the dreams I had when I was 17, my life would have been very different in ways I can barely comprehend anymore.

Two years ago, at my father's funeral, I was having one of those strange conversations I always seem to have with people, mostly because I have a tendency to ask weird questions.

I asked my first cousin Marti, who is nine months younger than I am, if her life had turned out the way she had thought it would.

Her first response was that of course it hadn't, because she never would have thought when she was young that she would ever have left Ohio. She grew up near Columbus, and two of her three siblings have basically lived their lives within 150 miles of their home town.

I don't know what I would or wouldn't have expected, but I honestly would never have believed I would have lived in six or seven additional states and one foreign country after graduating from high school. I would never have believed I would be married twice or that I would have had a life-changing experience -- in Texas, of all places -- in my 61st summer.

I suppose the real answer in all of this is that we always have to remain open to the possibility that our dreams might change, and then be flexible enough to adapt when they do.

And if we're truly lucky, we don't even remember all the things of which we dreamed when we were young.