Sometimes, I feel no more adept at life than the wily coyote, desperate and straining to pry a boulder off the cliff upon which I precariously balance, all in hopes of finally squashing that irksome and appetizing roadrunner.
Only most days, that boulder won't budge. When it does, it gives me a flicker of fleeting hope before gravity forces it back down into place. On the rare days when I manage to wrench the stone from its stubborn seat, it defies all expectations and laws of physics simultaneously, finding its merry way down the slope of one canyon and up another, only to land squarely back where it began. And on those very special days, it flattens me like a pancake.
When it comes to creating or doing anything, or otherwise making any kind of forward progress, this is the way of things. Some days just don't work out. Two steps forward followed swiftly by twenty tepid or tumultuous steps backward. An exponential entropy that locks me up with enmity toward the very things I want to do, want to have done, or more deeply, the man I long to be. It's a certain kind of stuckness that feels like a stubborn, stuttering tongue that won't allow you to get a true word in edgewise.
There are a few great labors of my life in which this has been proven time and again.
Managing and maintaining a healthy marriage is a day-to-day excision of self in favor of your partner, a painful price for peace but rewarded with unity.
Raising children feels like an exercise in futility, always matched by moments of flaring love that make no sense.
Writing a book and building a world feels every day like the most impossible task, but knowing this makes it all the more necessary.
Ministering to people can be thankless and humiliating, while giving meaning beyond any vast host of triumphs.
Just behind every moment of resistance and stuckness lies in wait tremendous potential energy on the verge of being unleashed. The moment the boulder breaks free and a generous amount of dopamine is released. And yet, as Newton reminds us, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Sometimes, that release of energy propels you backward. Other times, you are launched so far forward into the great unknown and the frightful unforeseen that you have no bearing on your surroundings and no heading on where to venture next.
But no matter the result, the release of that potential pent-up energy is progress. There is momentum, even if it forces you back.
The path ahead is rarely a straight one. It is winding, full of steep climbs and treacherous mountainside switchbacks, laced with pitfalls and potholes. To traverse it requires all the grit and gumption one can muster, for anything worth doing requires more.
Always more.
But isn't that living? Isn't that the inherent beauty of being alive? For as long as we live, there will, in fact, be more. The work must continue even after you've finished the book, sold the business, and seen the kids through to graduation and individuation. There will be more breath to breathe and blood to bleed—so long as we are alive. This hidden and plain truth is the enemy of entropy.
The goal, after all, is not the end—it's the next beginning.
Commenti