Life is not like Instagram: Will This Ever End?
When the biggest challenge of your life starts to loom out of control, how do you decide whether to continue or quit?
Imagine being in the middle of a grand adventure. You know the type (if you don’t, start thinking about what yours is), that one. The story you just know you need to go and live out because if you don’t the chance will pass in such a grating, deep-felt way you’ll always have that hole where you let the big one slip. Subsequently all the incredible doors that open in the wake of that first one…well, you’ll never know what you might have found through them.
So you take the adventure but then, in the midst of it all, you miss home. You miss your friends. You’re on a sandbar staring out at a huge river with a single canoe as your friend and everything your still camera could possibly capture would paint the most wonderful picture of this moment.
But only you know the sadness of not having another person to share this with. To reach out an arm around those shoulders and kiss a cheek and feel the tickle of her hair as the wind tussles it against your neck; oh how lovely this would be.
And yes it would be lovely, better than glorious, but in the absence of company it’s not the end of that experience. The wisest people have travelled solo but seen it through despite the lure of distant loves. Those people who count will always be waiting no matter what. It is avoiding the easy temptations and seeing through a rite of passage that earns us the true, unimaginable reward.
Do I stay and finish, or leave in the knowledge that there’s a comfortable hug waiting at home? And a bed. My bed.
The adventure analogy is the best one I have here; long journeys have played such a defining role in my life. To look at a map, knowing you have that far to go even when you’ve been travelling for weeks. Well, it’s asking for trouble. I’ve zoomed in, only thought about the day ahead and what I need to achieve. Experiencing the moment isn’t a blessed gift that we’re born with — we actually live in a world which is at war with presence and contentment. But separating myself from stuff and expectation and pressure has always been a saving grace.
I know I’ll earn the right to look at the full map only when I reach the end, when it’s done. And that way it’s not just places that define the route and the journey, it’s the names of people who popped up along the road, snapshots of coastlines and desert, micro images of dust swirling and grasses dancing in the morning breeze. That steaming coffee at a gas station on a cold morning. The smell of the world after a heavy rain.
You set yourself this electrifying task, this challenge. You did it for a reason. Sure, as time moves on you change and so do your needs, but standing resolute with commitment is another human attribute which is so much harder these days.
To commit to another human for life has proved too tough for many of us (more on this in Damn You, Cupid later in this series) and that’s an adventure too. So is moving to another country. Deciding to learn a skill that will take years. Writing out a yes (formerly bucket) list and taking it all the way. Anything that removes you from the proverbial comfort zone (vomit), takes you out of your box and offers a different view of life, probably one that has scared a lot of people you know.
Completion. True, solid, un-friggin-beatable completion. Through the trauma and the doubt and the questions asked of your strength of character and the realisation that if we stopped and quit life wouldn’t end. The excuses and the justifications and the what-ifs and the input from everyone around you. “Come home. Come home, we miss you. We’ll still love you if you don’t finish.”
But will you still love yourself? Knowing that you’re honouring yourself now, not the work and effort that went before but simply everything you know in your head right now. That is peace.
It’s easy to quit. Easy to lie down. To give up. To go home.
It’s easy to battle through injury and do yourself long term damage, too.
It’s easy to let the meaning of something get out of control because it has become your world.
And it’s easy to find someone who will tell you what you want to hear.
But only you can say what you need to hear. This is all that counts.
Comfort kills ambition like nothing else in your life. The thoughts of comfort are just as dangerous as lying on sofa sized bean bags playing Playstation or sitting at home on the couch cuddling the dogs.
Quell these dreams, you’re a kinetic machine and movement is your power.
This is you now, not the you who decided to be here in the first place. You’re stronger now despite the doubts. But imagine, just for one second, what it will be like to cross that finish line with the deepest internal grin. To be that elderly couple in the park who still kiss and cuddle. To sleep in one hundred different places a year and wake up at home in each one.
Commit. You and your mission are the same. Not being sure is just part of the quest, just as the blisters and the heartache and the loneliness and your desire for comfort are designed to try and pull you off track.
Create your own inertia and may nothing knock you off course. Put your foot down, your head down, your heart on the table. You got this.
But imagine, just for one second, what it will be like to cross that finish line with the deepest internal grin. To be that elderly couple in the park who still kiss and cuddle. To sleep in one hundred different places in a year and wake up at home in each one.
To understand the difference between what you need to do and what you want to do, between impossible and hard, between choice and inevitability, between temptation and unflinching certainty.
Every decision comes with its compromise and the bigger a commitment you make the more you stand to lose out on, and also the more you have to gain. So it’s no wonder these choices are hard, because there are benefits on both sides.
To understand these things and how to act on them is the difference between the best and the worst versions of you. It’s a conundrum but that’s ok, because you’re human.
By design you’re a beautifully confused problem solver. Do your thing, only you have the solution.
Read the introduction to my Life Is Not Like Instagram Series, which includes a link to all articles published on this topic
Share my journey on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram (which sometimes even shows the bad stuff)
