Some goals aren’t for you now. They’re for the eight-year-old who believed you’d get there.

A few of the things you are chasing were promised long before you knew what they would cost, and you are the only person in a position to keep that promise. Doing it is not childish. It is loyalty to someone who had nothing to go on except the belief that you would get there.

Pick one old ambition and give it something real this month, even an hour a week. Resist the urge to modernize it into something more respectable. If you finish it, the person you did it for will never know, and it will still have been worth the trouble.