I would like to circumnavigate hope.
Bypass the time spent producing contentment imagining the thing that will one day come, but never does. Skip straight to the part that liberates one from a dangling carrot that is all promise and no guarantee.
I’m tired of hope.
I would like to no longer wait for things like truth, or justice. To wait for this world to be a place worth living in for everyone, wait for the moment I can do what I want, or be who I am. This is a waste.
The future is an idea. Only the present moment is real, and hope has me waiting for now.
I’m not a patient person.
Once I accidentally started my tomato seedlings too early. The time they were growing and thriving was when they needed to be put in the ground, to meet the sun and the sky with equal fervor down into the earth below.
But it was a cold spring, a snowy May, a more common occurrence now with the dawn of climate change where the transitions between the extremes of winter and summer are no longer as prevalent as they once were. Stunted, they missed their opportunity. When they were ready, life wasn’t ready to meet them. Most of them withered and died entirely.
It often feels like this. I think of all the times seeds of inspiration, seeds of ideas, pockets of momentum for execution were ready, but remained stagnant and perished because there wasn’t a space for them. After a decade of this, you are naturally left to wonder, what’s the use? You can’t just have the internal resources. The external circumstance must rise to meet the occasion, something I have no control over. I can’t control the weather, and I can’t predict the future. The tomatoes deserved to be met with the sun, the sky, and the earth with equal enthusiasm. They, I, deserved to be met halfway.
To hell with fate. We take what we need now.
That’s partly what prompted my popular post on Authenticity, a journal entry from January that some of you wanted an update on.
Not much has changed since then, except for my employment falling off the edge of a cliff for the foreseeable future.
I will no longer be at the will of circumstance, to do something because I’m forced to out of necessity. I’ve worked too hard to only be where I am.
Today, I don’t care how long it takes, whether it be 6 months or 6 years, the next place I end up needs to be worth investing in. It needs to be good for my financial stability, my growth, and my overall wellbeing. It needs to be equally invested in me.
It doesn’t mean that it won’t be hard, just worth it, and actually viable. My adult life has been about contending with a circumstance that I didn’t ask for. I have unmet needs, some of them very basic needs.
You see, when you’re waiting for now, as if it were not already here, you are not in the present. You’re not in the future, as that is an idea. You’re not in the past, as that has already happened. So where are you? Nowhere. That’s where I’ve been for a long time.
A thick curtain of obligation has been lifted to reveal the thin veils distorting what lies between myself and all the dead seedlings, and all the seeds yet to germinate. The veils are thin enough to see past, but blurry enough to cause confusion.
What breaks through the veil, I wonder?
Is it subtle changes? Is it writing every day? Long hikes in nature that you never had the time for? Is it learning how to make passive income? Is it having lunch with friends? Experiencing music from your favorite artists, and new ones? Is it trips back home? Is it using the decay of the past spent waiting, strategizing, as the fertilizer for the present?
In time, we will find out.
That is the update … for now.
I can very much relate to this. And it's very good and wise advice, too.