On Waiting (For What You Want)
On Waiting (For What You Want)
What can you do to live a full life in the here and now?
I’m probably best described as ‘relentless’, and I love this about myself.
I love my drive. I love my tenacity. I love that I am able to grit my teeth, re-centre myself and get on with things after I make a mistake. I love that I am getting better at this, that I am becoming more open to and accepting of ‘failure’, and how my world is shifting, changing and opening up for me as a result.
I love that I endeavour to be hyper-focused, disciplined and intentional with the way in which I live my life. More than anything else, I just love life — pure and simple.
It’s a blessing. It’s also a fantastic adventure.
There is a ‘but’ to this, of course.
The ‘but’ is that, for better or worse, like all of us, I am also a human being.
I get tired. I get sad. I get scared. I get sick.
I am not, and my life will never be, ‘perfect’ — at least not in relation to a fantasy I’ve constructed in my mind.
But I don’t want [it] to be.
For years, I lived my life on fast-forward, ‘too fast for this world’. In some ways, I got ahead, but I was also going through the motions. I felt lost and disconnected from myself and the world around me. I was in pain. I hurt. And no superficial validation or achievements could make up for that.
That fantasy, that dream — it doesn’t exist. It isn’t real. Or, if it is real, it’s hollow. It holds me back. It stops me from living, breathing, being here right now, appreciating who I am, what I have and how far I’ve come. It focuses on the negatives, the deficiencies — all the things that aren’t rather than are, and, worst of all, it cruelly positions them as what ‘could be’.
But I don’t know what could be.
I don’t know what’s ahead of me.
I don’t know where I’m going to be in two weeks, two months, two years from now — let alone twenty.
I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know what I’m going to do, who I’m going to meet, what I’m going to discover and experience — I just know that I need to let things be.
Trust.
The rest will take care of itself.