When I was a young man my parents took me to a cabin. My parents’ friends owned the place. It was a fun day, and at night there was a fire by the water. Another older gentleman had arrived recently. He started a conversation with me and was asking me questions about what I wanted to do with my life. The advice he gave me was not only profound, but formative to my character. He told me, to the best of my recollection (this was over 30 years ago):
“You are standing at a crossroads. There are an infinite number of roads leading away here. You need to choose one to walk down. You might want to turn around and try a different road, but that means you’ll have to start from here again. It’s okay to do that a few times, but if you just keep starting over for the rest of your life you won’t get anywhere. Sometimes the road you pick will get rough or hard, but all roads get like that. If you get scared by that and turn around you’ll never get anywhere in your life.”
No matter what you do in life you need to keep going. You need to recognize the problems that are holding you back from getting to your destination because sometimes they won’t even necessarily appear as “problems.” The reason I mention this is: over the last few years I have started to recognize many of the things we think are good, are actually bad. Many of the things we think are bad for us, are actually good in the long term. This doesn’t mean we should be happy about the bad things, nor that we should fail to recognize them as bad, but I think we should, instead, be reminding ourselves that the actions we take to alleviate the burdens caused by the bad things in our lives result in good things later in our lives.
An example of this is: everyone we no longer associate with due to the occurrences of the last few years. I personally no longer suffer the company of people simply because they exist in the same sphere as I do. Now I value the character of people and I focus on building relationships with people who I deem to be of high quality.
Because we were able to experience a hardship it forced us to either grow beyond our state of comfort, or we had to fall back into living a life of mediocrity. The same type of mentality can be applied to the “good” things we perceive as well.
If something “good” happens sometimes we often times will relax a little bit; feel a little more comfortable. Comfort and convenience end up being the catalyst to complacency. This doesn’t mean you can’t be happy, but you must not become vain in your revelry of the positive.
Many people have interpreted my most recent contributions to our overall community as “pulling away” or “reeling back” or even “disengaging.” I have always been misunderstood in my endeavours, and this is usually due to my own inability to communicate to others the chaos which is my thought process. I would like to be clear:
I am not suggesting we “give up.” I am suggesting we recognize our comfort and reject it. I am suggesting we push onward, harder, and with more zeal towards that which are our goals.
We can not go back to a world that no longer exists. If we rest the rot of the decay behind us will catch up to us. We must then push harder now.
You don’t have to to go home, but you can’t stay here… why would you want to stay here? We’re not there yet.