It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important. – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince.
If we truly love something, we spend (or invest?) time in it. As time is a valuable resource, when invested, it makes the person, goal or activity even more important for us. But there’s a negative side too. Sometimes we hold on to the past and to the irrelevant goals just because we already spent too much time on them.