The Rise and Fall

All throughout your life you are constantly motivated to achieve. You're supposed to set and achieve goals, do your best, work hard and get far. That is the common motif. What "they" don't tell you is that after riding a massive wave of achievement, there is a sort of decent back into the ordinary. A crash, if you will.

As the pomp and circumstance died down, the cards stopped coming in and my graduation photos became a little outdated, I realized I had fallen back into ordinary territory. May was a big month for me. I had a lot of doctors appointments but got a clean bill of health. I ran a 5K in record time, for myself, at 36:33. I graduated Temple. A bunch of goals checked off my to-do list. The praise and accolades have died down and I'm left wondering what is next in the silence of it all.

This isn't a bad thing. But when you do great thing after great thing, the constant motivation and sense of achievement feels amazing. Like I said, it is like a high. Which makes someone like me frantic to build a new goal list. I've been doing some out of the ordinary things like getting up before work to go to the gym, taking late night yoga classes, biking 7 miles, watching my spending, and trying to meet new people. I've been job hunting, writing daily, trying to figure out if now is the best time to start my book. I've been plotting summer adventures, trying to muster up the confidence to complete an open mic night for stand up comedy, and creating little nuance goals in between all of that.

Which is great, live life to the fullest and what not. But there is some value in just sitting back and relaxing, enjoying the quietude. Except quietude scares me. I'm so worried I'll get too comfortable in the static state that I'll get stuck and stop achieving goals. Yet the reality of it all is this is the one time in my life where I have the opportunity to just chill for a hot second and breathe in the world around me. I'm only accountable to myself, no one else. There is great value in this grey area that I need to quickly learn to appreciate until it is gone.

Until next time...