Riding The Perish Wheel

"They kept going. They did it anyway."

This morning as my eyes drifted over the above words penned by Ryan Holiday in Courage Is Calling, I found myself pausing for a bit of ponder.

I'm gonna be honest here. For most of my life I have never had an issue plowing forward. My mind has always gone full tilt, flitting about like a butterfly at a pollen convention. Even when I was in the worst of my thyroid and auto-immune dysfunction there was never a thought about stopping.

I wanted to learn it all, do it all, I wanted to exist.

Here lately though, here lately I find myself not wanting to go. I want to stop. I want to hide. I want to be left alone.

I suppose this is entirely normal for a person to feel this way, especially one who is medium aged and has lived a very full existence thus far. I have just never experienced such an overwhelming urge to not want to keep going.

But then, as I read those words, I thought about my ancestors, both near and distant. They kept going through blizzards, sabre tooth cat attacks, crop failures, family member deaths, war, famine, and through all manner of uncertainty. They kept on human-ing.

And really, it's what you do when you are down that sometimes makes all the difference.

So, even though I'm more than a bit weary from it all, I will most definitely trudge on, because there's work to do.

Living in the 21st century as a human being is taxing in a different way. I won't starve if my crops fail, but never before in history has a person had more stimuli. As a highly sensitive person I think part of the existential exhaustion I am feeling is the weight of all that stimuli. All around me is a constant throng of dopamine drip-inducing distraction.

So, instead of just being exposed to all the things in my insulated geographical community, I am constantly bombarded with all the things on the entire planet. Already I limit my media consumption, but I think an actual sabbatical from it all might be in order.

That and a hefty dose of focused, purpose-driven action. It's easy in this era for our attention to be fractured and fragmented across a multitude of things, and I sometimes wonder if more of what ails the planet would benefit from a collective exhale and refocus on specific things that matter.

But that's a post for another time.

Tomorrow, I am heading out into the wilderness for a couple of days. A bit of restorative time in Nature, free from all the burdens and cares of this postmodern life is usually all it takes to snap me back into proper living life intentionally and wonderfully form.

Because we all have a job to do.