You spend so much time working to find your footing in the phase of life you’re in. You spend so much time trying to master the pieces of yourself, the way you dress and where you walk for coffee and who you spend Saturday nights with. You work on building this very certain kind of experience, with the hope and expectation that one day, you’ll be able to hit cruise control. One day, it will all level out, and you’ll be able to live in the comfort you created.
That is not how it works. That is almost never how it goes.
The truth is that as soon as you master where you are, it’s time to move onto the next thing. You are not meant to reign supreme over the city you live, where everything and everyone is memorized, expected, and familiar. You are not supposed to work to the point that it becomes so effortless, so unchallenging, that your skills start to atrophy. You are not meant to build a comfortable lot in life and stay there, wait there, forevermore.
We often think that success is this tipping point, this moment where we have finally arrived. We are often dismayed to find that there is no such point, there is no one mountaintop upon which everything is realized and found. There is only a slow and continual climb, one peak is reached and then another is higher.
The uncomfortable truth is that if we are not working for something, we have stopped living entirely. That doesn’t mean we can’t savor the moment, appreciate the view, love wholly and fully who we are and those we’re with.
It only means that, in the metaphor of life, we cannot stop walking. There is no point at which the path becomes a drop-off and you’re excused from moving forward.
People try to do this all of the time, and it’s how they slowly erode their sense of self and destroy their lives. It’s how their minds and bodies become so corrupted by their own imagined ineptitude that they start to get scared. Scared that they cannot move forward, that they won’t. Scared of what will happen to them if they stay where they are, as they are.
This is how people settle into the comfort of that which is familiar, and confuse it for that which is good. This is how people stay with people who were meant for a season, and become a lifetime. This is how people start to feel lukewarm about their lives, uninspired by what they could do.
When the hunt and the hunger, ceases, so do we.
The choice of our lives is almost never between what is clearly right and what’s clearly wrong, and it is almost always between what we are used to and what is going to make our souls come alive.
So go. You were never meant to be a big fish in a small pond. If your life is so easily mastered, so effortlessly triumphed, your goals were not big enough. If you are sitting around wondering why when you have everything you could ever want you feel exhausted, uninspired and as though the future is completely futile, it’s because you do not have what you want. You have what you chose because it was safe and easy.
Get up. Choose again.
