I’ve outgrown something that still works.

One of the hardest things to question is something that isn’t obviously wrong.

It is much easier to understand why we might leave a relationship that makes us unhappy, a job we hate or a situation that has become impossible. There is a problem we can point towards and, even if making the change is difficult, there is usually a fairly understandable reason for making it.

It becomes more complicated when something still works. You might be good at the job, love the person, appreciate the life you have built or recognise that something has given you exactly what you once wanted from it. Other people may look at the same thing and wonder why you would ever consider changing it.

The uncomfortable possibility is that something can still be good and no longer be right for you in quite the same way.

We sometimes treat changing our relationship with something as though it invalidates everything that came before it. If I no longer want this, perhaps I was wrong to want it in the first place. But I’m not sure that follows. Something can have been exactly right for one period of our lives without earning a permanent place in every version that follows.

That doesn’t mean you need to leave anything. Sometimes noticing that something has changed is enough to make us approach it differently. Sometimes the thing itself can change with us. And sometimes, perhaps, we eventually have to acknowledge that gratitude for what something has given us is not the same as an obligation to keep choosing it.

It might be useful to ask yourself what you would choose if you encountered this part of your life for the first time today. And, perhaps more importantly, are you staying because it still feels right, or because it is difficult to justify leaving something that isn’t obviously wrong?