What is it you want?

When you envision the future, what does it look like?

Do you see an image of yourself looking or acting differently from how you see yourself today?

You might recall a time in your life, as a young child or adolescent, you might have thought, “Someday, I’m going to be an adult and…” It’s that “…and…” around which possibility branched, did it not? At the time you said that, it might have felt like the most important thing in the world. And that predicate, the “I’m going to be an adult” upon which all our hopes rested, had one of only two outcomes: it happened, or it didn’t.

Did you achieve that “and”? And if you did, did everything suddenly become better? And if you didn’t, was your life objectively worse for it?

In the Zone

You might have heard of or experienced the concept of “The Zone”; as in, “Getting in the zone”, wherein you found yourself in a state of intense focus, blissfully unaware of anything but the task in which you were involved. You may have experienced this at work, or at play, and felt an intense feeling of calm or even a wave of anxiety when it was broken, when you were distracted, as though woken from a blissful sleep only to find your beautiful dreams disappearing. And try as you might, you may have struggled in vain to get back to that place of inner peace.

You might recognize that it’s only in retrospect that you recognize that state; for as long as you reach out and try to grasp it again, you may only find that it’s just out of reach — your focus on it preventing you from seeing it for what it is.

Hindsight is 20/20

Your success, such that it is, is all around you, in what you’ve accomplished. The feelings that you’re seeking aren’t dependent upon the accomplishment of some other goal; you likely feel a taste of them when you imagine that future. These feelings of excitement and longing and happiness happen as an interpretation of autonomic responses within your body.

The problem you may find with chasing success is that it’s illusive; that there’s always something inside the image of what you think you should be that is changing with time. It is a break-tape held by runners keeping near constant pace with you, likely for more laps now than you’ve ever stopped to consider.