Recently, I’ve been struggling with inspiration.
More than a few personal endeavors, goals, and hopes have either crashed and burned or failed to get off the ground, and it has discouraged me far more than I anticipated. Especially in my writing. “What’s the point,” I’ve thought more than once, staring at a blank screen, unable to discover ideas or find the words, “No one is going to read them anyway.”
And in my most self-loathing moments, “Nothing I say or do matters.”
So, in response, I wrote nothing. For days. Which soon turned into weeks. Which now knocks on the door of months.
Feeling more and more discouraged (lost even), I resorted to old-school writing - in a paper journal! - to try and conjure a spark. “I give up,” I wrote in harsh black ink, “I just don’t know how.”
Rather quickly, the words came. Nothing fancy or poetic, just thoughts. Honest thoughts. And fears. Fears of failure, of wasted time and energy, and of doing this thing - whatever it is - wrong. Fears of embarrassment, rejection, and of regret. “I give up,” I wrote again, “I just don’t know how.”
I closed my journal, poured another cup of coffee, and headed to work. No solution. No resolution. No nothing. Just the weight of the task ahead, that students and staff will soon be in my school and my wife and children will be home when I get there.
And that brought a clarity, an understanding, to the reality that no matter how I feel about life, life doesn’t care much how I feel about it. No matter what, It still shows up. And it expects me too as well. Which is often why Life wins. Because it is relentless, consistent, and unapologetic in its one and only task: show up.
Should I not be expected to do the same?
There are so many friggin things I cannot control - how I am perceived, received, or embraced among the top. What I can control is whether or not I’m willing to try again. Whether or not I’m willing to show up, like Life, again and again.
It doesn’t have to always be pretty, but it does have to be always. For as Churchill (should have) shouted, “Do your worst, and we’ll do our best!” What matters is not that our best is enough, but that what’s best is enough.
And what’s best is that, even when we are at our worst, we show up.
- - - -
I don’t love that conclusion. Largely because it feels shallow. Insufficient. Uninspiring.
But really, I just don’t know what else to do. And sometimes, truthfully, it is all that I have - not giving up. Or at least, just showing up.
If I keep engaging with Life, maybe I can steal some from it.
Maybe.