Digging. Forevermore.

It’s the wanting of the dream that is satisfying, not the having.

Last week, I wrote about how I’m looking forward to a season of rebirth — the spring that waits just beyond this dark stretch — and how that light reminded me of the glow of our most common firefly.

Since then, I’ve realized I don’t want to wait for that light to arrive. I want to start working toward it now.

I’ve spent so long feeling stagnant and void of joy; it’s encouraging and exhilarating to have received this rather sudden jolt of impending hope.

As if urging me onward, the universe sent a bit of encouragement this week.

I received two quotes recently that coalesce with these thoughts. Serendipitous, yeah?

The first comes from Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck and Everything is Fucked: A Book About Hope. In a recent newsletter, he reflected on what happened after achieving his decade-long dream of becoming a best-selling author. The dreamer had become the achiever – yet after so many years of chasing that one goal, he found himself lost after catching it:

It’s the wanting of the dream that is satisfying, not the having.

It’s great to achieve your dreams, but make sure you’ve diversified your dreams enough, across enough areas of your life, so that you never wake up one day without one.

I have to admit that this is exactly what happened to me and that is why I have spent the last couple of years in an existential crisis of sorts. My dreams existed along a single plane and when those dreams were shelved, I found myself dreamless.

I’ve been aware of this, which is important. Awareness alone, however, doesn’t necessarily provide the tools required to course correct.

Of all the metaphorical tools we need in our arsenal to tackle an existential element such as this, I believe few are greater than inspiration. And while inspiration can present itself to you, I find it much more satisfying to go around digging for it.

Like buried treasure – after all, that’s what it is.

It requires action. Not couch-sitting and pity-party throwing.

Sure, if the Earth moves around enough and her geography erodes away over time, it’s possible that her treasures will eventually reveal themselves. But you’ll find that aforementioned hope and inspiration a lot faster if you rip those sleeves off and start digging.

And as weird as it sounds, that digging and exploring can be just as rewarding as the end goal, if not more so. Life’s a journey, not a destination as my good friends in Aerosmith once so famously (and tritely) put it. Who knows what else we might dig up and what other paths we may be given to follow?

I also received the following quote from Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, from “Familiar Studies of Men and Books:”

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

I can’t help but find some truth in that. Knowing who we are in this moment based on where we’ve been and constantly working on becoming the next iteration of ourselves – whatever that may mean for everyone, individually – is the only true, universal meaning of life.

Not the achievement of the goal.

Not the hoarding of success stories.

But the constant pursuit of what’s next.

I don’t know what’s next for me, truthfully. Either way, you won’t find me on my couch waiting for it to happen.

I’ll be over here digging. Digging forevermore.

-jtf