*A ‘former’, overachiever, if you will . . .
I have been getting into a good flow of things recently, so subsequently, I have been able to get out of my shell more. That is, to talk to people, to share each other’s progress on things we’re working on and then dreams, plans for the future, etc. The usual ‘productive’ hopeful conversations that’s quite fortunate from young adults, as the much older ones would think. I think.
This comes, too, with more exposure to that wild world of conventional success. I say conventional because it’s everywhere: it’s on every social media platform, every friend group and family unit, every modern society—that expectation for people, especially those deemed to be better in whatsoever way than ‘the average’ (whatever that means), to achieve. ‘To achieve’—here I take that as a verb with no object, because recently I’ve realised that most of the time the object of that achievement does not matter as long as one takes that action on.
Sure there are fields that are more acceptable than others, where one would get support from the get-go because the success is assumed and certain, but, really, as long as one gets to where one is expected, to most others, the means do not matter. As long as you get that money, that house and car, that lifestyle, that fame you’d have ‘achieved’. The rest is just a matter of maintaining that status.
(Notoriety is very much an effective way to success—not as ‘talked about’ or ‘promoted’ as a means because there’s this façade that it’s unacceptable but ‘notorious’ individuals and groups have an easier time getting accepted into society, or ‘respected’ even, than some others who are not.)
Hence, that web that those are simply beginning to establish theirselves in society as individuals get caught into: what else can one do but seek that path of security?
Now there’s nothing wrong with that, of course, even I wouldn’t really care about the means others would take, but in the recent mornings I have been waking up with an unidentified ease. Which today I have determined to be that web I got myself wrapped around with.
I think the image I’ve set up with ‘the web’ might have been more negative than I had imagined; it’s really simply more like an almost-invisible spider’s web that I, someone faintly amused with spiders and the like, absentmindedly walked into. It’s pretty easy to get out of, but the realisation is not without some humour.
After all those days of routinely working at things—admitted, is quite natural for a recovering workaholic like I am—the temptations of the future and of results and successes unsurprisingly arrived. At every random hour, they would come knocking on my office door and I would frantically think of the next steps to appease them, to ensure that I will get there, to the places I have envisioned, to the things I am striving for, to the achievement I am expected to get to.
But now I sit in front of my desk and scribble these words in the messiest handwriting: what I have right now, where I am in right now, this whole current state is much, much, much better than all of those other things in my imagination, in that so-called ‘future’. For one, perhaps, is because those things yet-to-come would require more of what the present does: more effort, more energy, more time, among all other things. Many changes would have to occur first; much of life would have to flow through before that ebb of much difference arrives. Another, too, is the knowing that such might happen sooner rather than later and so comes the more self-induced pressure to ‘prepare’ and be ‘as ready as possible’ and the overwhelm from not really knowing what that means.
And then, the one thing I am certain of: that the here-and-now is much, much better than any of those thoughts, than any of that ‘envisioned future’ because this one is real. This exists. This is the only thing I am sure of.
The next phase of what-is-now might drastically change for the better—who knows? I can predict and analyse and do all those sorts of stuff but why? Why trouble myself with that?
And honestly, I’ve been realising that the best sort of ‘success’ is the one that comes surprisingly: when I would lose my grip on that pursuit of a specific outcome and simply let myself fully embrace whatever is in this moment. When, after many more moments have unknowingly passed, I look back and realise that I got even farther than where I had thought I would be by simply letting life take me where I ought to be.
I would have ended up here-there-wherever, anyway, right?