Last week I found myself up at about 2am, incapable of falling asleep. There I was, in complete silence staring at the ceiling above me. It had been a long day and my mind raced from one thought to another as I played back a highlight reel of the day’s events in my head. I thought about all the things I had set out to accomplish that day. I thought about those I had been successful in accomplishing and those I couldn’t quite get to that day. “They’ll just have to wait till tomorrow”, I thought to myself. Somewhere in the erratic nature of all that thinking I was doing, I started to think about the future and where my life was heading in general (I’m sure I’m not the only one who has found themselves obsessing about life at wee hours of the night). That led to me observing the evidence of where I am in life right now compared to where I thought (or had planned) to be and as much as I hate to admit it, part of me was overcome by fear. Fear that thirty or forty years from now, I would have ultimately failed in the pursuit of my goals… that I would have lived in a fantasy world where I thought anything was possible, only to be left holding an empty sac at the end of it all.
Sometimes I tell myself I would be happier if I didn’t try to dream too much…I would be happier if I just tried to keep things simple. Maybe part of this is true. Ambition can be a double edged sword. It can be an internal engine that drives you and makes you dig deeper than you ever thought you could in the face of adversity. It can also be something that weighs you down… a thief that robs you of your ability to be happy…a dictator that unequivocally prohibits you from living in the moment. How one safeguards against ambition becoming the latter is maybe discussion for another day. All I want to say right now is that I recognize the ebbs and flows of emotions that come with daring to have dreams and pursue them.
As I stared up at the ceiling and continued my internal dialogue, I couldn’t help but take my mind back to my college days when I lived with my uncle. We had a porch at the back of the house overlooking a forest of trees that acted as a blanket, shielding what lay on the other side from plain sight. Many nights I would sit on that back porch for a bit and stare at those tall trees. They were a metaphor…the trees were the unknowns and what lied on the other side, was my future. As I sat and stared and tried to imagine what was on the other side of those trees, I would also think about my future, what the coming years were going to bring and if I was ultimately going to be successful in life. These days that is not something that I do a lot. Yesterday’s future is my present today and over the years I have learned to focus most of my energy in simply following through on strategy an execution to achieve my desired outcomes. As a result, the sense of fear I was experiencing in that moment though not a stranger, was like a long lost acquaintance that I had not spoken to in a while.
I guess that is why I decided to write this down. First, to acknowledge that fear. I recognize it and I need a little bit of it to keep me sharp. Secondly and more importantly, to encourage myself to keep going. It is human to fear, but it also human to defy the odds. In my late teen years I went through a period where the first thing I did every morning was to recite aloud to myself the words of the Richard Rodgers’ song made popular by the Sound of Music movie. Today, I will conclude by typing aloud those words once again:
Climb every mountain
Search high and low,
follow every byway, every path you know
Climb every mountain,
ford every stream,
follow every rainbow, till you find your dream.
A dream that will need ALL the love you can give,
every day of your life, for as long as you live!
God bless the dreamers everywhere.
Nicely written buddy! Ambition is indeed a double edged sword, and tackling fear begins with acknowledging it exists. As known, there is nothing to fear but fear itself, the only way to overcome fear is to face the it, push past it.