Long-term inter-personal relations have a propensity, it seems, to grow routine. And not ‘routine’ in the good sense, of freeing up time to be more creative (as Williams James advocated), but in the boring sense of one too many boxes of vanilla wafers.
Let me explain: Over the years I, like many folks, have managed to cover myself with lots of layers of ‘stuff’ that I really don’t care very much about. I can joke about them all and slough it off those layers pretty readily if others don’t share one or more of these interests or dreams.
A little closer to the core there’s some stuff that I do ‘sorta’ care about. I share this stuff mostly with friends, who seem to think I’m ‘OK’ even if I do take that stuff sorta seriously … and are maybe even sorta amused/curious that I do. It all has something to do with developing trust. I’d be fine if it all stopped right there.
But then there are those folk (e.g., ‘significant others’) who I spend a lot of time with …. 
Eventually, of course, these folk sift through all the ‘surface’ stuff until they encounter the ‘sacred’ stuff that I really care about (i.e., that to which I have strong emotional attachments).
I think of this stuff as my inner egg. It does, in some sense, define who I really am; i.e., my identity … what I’ll fight to defend.
I find, when I look more closely at this ‘sacred core’ of my identity, that most of it is being sustained by an 
underlying fear of losing something I can’t imagine not needing. And most of the time it’s, in fact, only providing partial protection from the stimuli that trigger those fears. Which is to say this inner shell of mine is pretty well running the show most of the time, or at least trying to, and not necessarily doing a very good job of it.
And here’s the rub; after a while my ‘significant others’ get to know the shape and texture of that egg pretty well … even with all my clever fakes and feigns. And that predictability, of course, can, it seems, become a bit ‘boring’ … “been there done that”.
So, given that I don’t want to be ‘boring’, the name of the games seems to be to crack open that egg; ah, but that can be a lot easier said than done
I was thinking about this the other day while thinking about hope. [I’ve found that I’m really attached to stories that seem to offer hope and more recently I’d been thinking about how experiencing sorrow is 
really about accepting the loss of hope.] And then I starting wondering about why hopeful stories are so hard to let go of? The answer, for me, seems pretty obvious: to let go of hope is to let go of what I think of as my essential needs … and that requires that let go of what I think of as ‘me‘.
And when all is done and finished; letting go of ‘me’ requires, what I suppose we would call, a ‘leap of faith’ … that’s there something more than despair on the far side of that leap.
Finding the courage to make that leap becomes easier if I think of myself as being defined by my ability to adapt, like a chameleon (or the ‘hero’ of Joseph Campbell’s journeys). And making that identity transformation involves moving away from the concept that I’m letting go of one notion of myself in exchange for another towards a notion that I really am this capacity for change … something that simply, fundamentally, isn’t predictable or rational or in fact even describable.
It reminds of the lyrics of an old Credence song: “I never lost one minute of sleepin’ worryin’ ’bout the way things might have been. Big wheel keep on turnin’
Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ on the river.”