Elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school.
We push. We push. We keep pushing some more.
Higher education. More knowledge. More skills.
In academic school or in the real world school of hard knocks, the learning styles may be different and the end result may be profoundly different as well. Neither one necessarily the right choice. We are supposed to have goals and aspirations. “What do you want to do when you grow up?” And if you change your mind early, you are naive and foolish. It’s more forgiving in the future if you’re established as you’ve been “doing something with your life.” Like right now what you are doing truly matters. It might. It might not. If we don’t or can’t get out of our mental infancy, we won’t be around as a people when the sun peters out and the world goes dark, assuming the earth doesn’t get struck with another asteroid before then.
When looking at our lives, how can we make these judgement calls? “When I grow up I want to be…”
As a legal adult I get to play “What do I want to do with my life.” And it does feel like a game sometimes, like I should now know exactly where my life is, where it is headed and how it should get there. Any deviation and life seems like a gamble. Maybe I’m not mature enough to make a single choice and stay with it regardless of the consequences. Or maybe I’m mature enough to question what I am doing and I’m willing to accept the responsibility for a change. If you are in motion, any new direction or motion, including stopping, is a change. Stopping and not moving can lead to stagnation. Moving without change can lead to complacency. Even as I write I question if complacent is a good or bad thing, if it can even be given those qualifiers directly. An outside force of perspective helps to define this and usually it comes by watching others. Through these others we can choose to see if our place is where we want to be or not. For how else can we judge but through the eyes of others, unless we are just living my ourselves away from interactions with others. From there we have to accept the responsibility of our choice whether we change or not. The indecisiveness of choice is the act of staying complacent. Even with an external force we get to choose but in this case staying on the same path will require action and change while accepting the change is to stay complacent. Once again, forcing new thinking that complacent is neither good nor bad.
I’m facing choices and for now I’m complacent. I see the external forces coming up and I’m going to have to make some choices if I want to stay where I’m at or just go with the flow.
As U2 said, I’m “running to stand still.”
-SFA