When You Get Going, You Get Tougher
Your mom just called. A road widening program by the government will hit your family house in the countryside in a month. In your part of the world, things like this happen, and there’s nothing much you can do about it.
You get a throbbing headache and you get anxious. You’ve had sleepless nights since that call. You’ve been out of a job for ten months now and you’ve almost used up the separation pay from that last employment. You’re barely getting by, and now this. You’ve hurdled a lot in the last several months, but this is different.
Your last unemployment was unexpected yet you’re still out of a job not by chance but by choice. You are unemployed because you have a dream, and you have been working on that dream since you realized you can no longer throw away another decade of your life for someone else who could get rid of you anytime. So you don’t actively look for a job, and you don’t accept offers coming your way. You toil for what you believe you need to do to have the life you want because you are starting from scratch and heck, there’s a hell of a lot that needs to be done. But you have not found your break yet, and now you need the money. It seems as if the universe is telling you it’s now “time’s up” for your dream and time for you to get back into the real world.
You’re at a crossroads. You start to rethink your situation. You could accept those job offers and take the fast way out of your quandary. Your mind knows you could demand good pay, save the house with the money that would regularly come in again. Yes, it would mean getting back to the daily grind that you have come to hate, but it would also mean being financially capable again, as you have been before this. It could be worth it, you tell yourself, to end the struggle now and just forget about all these and go back to where you were before. But something keeps nagging at you. Something just doesn’t feel right. Your heart keeps telling you that making that leap back won’t make you happy. It keeps telling you that making that leap back means giving up the life that you have already decided that you wanted; the life that you have already started to work on realizing.
And then it hits you that despite having less money than before, you are happier now. You are doing the things that you want to do, in your own time and pace, with the freedom to go wherever you want to go. You realize more than ever that you value that more and that it is something that you can never give up anymore.
They say that when the going gets tough, the tough get going. So you gather all the strength you can muster and think of other avenues to solve your immediate money problems, while still clawing away at realizing your dream life. You swipe away the throbbing headache and the sleepless nights because you know now that when you get going, you get tougher. And you tell yourself to get up and push through because now, more than ever, you know what you want and you know deep inside that you won’t have to make that decision ever again.
