When dreams buckle beneath their weight And it’s time to move forward, Realism tells one greatness will have to wait.
When force’d to neglect Momentum’s bell In a drawn-out Sofie’s choice To simply allow the past to crumbell,
When I admit breakeven will take a while, Resaddling my neglected horse Exacts a humility I cannot reconcile.
I am a new animal Wiser than before This time primal.
Leaving nothing to chance Motivation and doom, goals and hurdles A spiraling seductive dance
Focus Now, the only stopping me is me Focus
I have an impressive imagination. I put it to great use to manifest the most majestic fantastical realities for people. Limping Lenny can now leap castle walls, the Bristeltoe orphanage is kept by talking woodland creatures - now placing kids in homes more effectively than ever before. But this wonderful life has quickly become a nightmare when I recently discovered my blessings to the kindest people in Europe were curses all along.
No imagination is more visceral and rife with divergent outcomes as one plagued by fear. Just imagine something brushing your hand in a dark room… what twisted horror could it have been if the only good thing it could have been is impossible.
This is my state. Every leap Lenny takes with his new leg breaks an orphan’s leg. For each Bristletoe orphan housed, a child close to former patients of mine have fallen mute. I cannot bear to uncover which other cruelties I have haphazardly imposed by borrowing fortunes under the guise of “blessings.” I have helped so many people I don’t want to know!
I tremble as this reality besets me. Suddenly this study filled with mail could be incalculable records of bad, worse, and horrid news. My blood has stopped but my heart is racing. I will need to rectify this somehow. My family can be affected; I haven’t seen them in three fortnights. I am frozen and have no remedy to their predicament nor mine.
A bird hits my windowpane.
The crude light of day winds down To reveal the twinkles beneath the veil
The crunchy day-old snow Pads the grass below our feet
I stare alone at the expanse in unison with other longing creatures
Light from the stars Pin me to the ground, my old commitments, my future failures
Is my capacity limited To only give this grazing pet the world?
I let the gentle scene Fuel me as it had decades before
My gazing partner joined the aerial spectators since then And she has high hopes for me
I let the burdening history Inspire my plans of manifestation
These chains must hold some secret to the happiness they inspire
The brave Jasper, never one to shy from a righteous adventure, trudges into the cave's abyss. He reassures himself aloud that he will find the creature that has terrorized the nearby town, increasingly, almost to protest and drone-out the cacophony of clangs and screeches further into the void.
Then a light appears. A faint end to the tunnel. He approaches and emerges to a scene unrecognizable to anyone back in Winchester. Two formidable buildings with tops beyond Jasper's sight made up the walls of the end of the tunnel, and armored carriages veered across the passageway before him. He took in the unforgiving excitement and chaos of the scene for a few minutes then collapsed in the nearest tavern restroom. He breathed, then resumed his quest.
"Have you seen the thief of joy that plagues local children with despondence and listlessness?", he asks bar patrons. As he struggles to crowd out distracting new magic and dialects, he can focus in on a few possible suspects: a network of drug dealers or a public media agency that spews viral negativity. He ventures to learn more.
Then one worthwhile distraction caught Jasper's eyes, heart and soul. A woman dressed in his era's noble garments walked past the tavern window. He follows her immediately to connect.
"Fair maiden, have you also come here for the cure to hopelessness?"
"I never thought of it that way but, yes, I think I found it," she responds. She agrees to meet after sunset as long as Jasper "doesn't have any medieval weapons on him," so he waits.
As Jasper waits for Claire on a riverwalk, all the ugliness and hurt bustling of the metropolis starts to wind down, replaced with a warm red sky and glimpses of nature waking up. Now the gentle colors of the sunset and cool evening breeze begin to replace the earlier chaos, Jasper sits with an assured trust that Claire will have the answer he needs.
In the nearest term, each of your - really our- greatest needs of action and reflection are different. Through each journey of discovery, there lies times, one, when it is vital to open your horizons to see what the world has to offer and how your perceptions could all be shattered; and, two, when you must defend your ability to to be willfully blind to ulterior paradigms with clenched knuckles that death can't unlock. I will start with a story to share the evolution through such a cycle of revelation -- and YOU, only you, can choose for yourself to rethink how your unearthed destiny is coercing you to destroy your life, or to simply use my words like ear worms popping in the tinder-fuel you need to reach your destination. Here goes:
My high school wrestling journey was prodded at multiple points by coaches and strangers who saw that my goals were set too low: "hey, you can win conference all 4 years", "you shouldn't be aiming for anything less that all state", to "I want to be state champ by my junior year because I can't gamble this life goal on a single-year fluke". I really gree to love it and saw myself change almost overnight from the kid with 4 sports to the force of will wrestler that will break into any gym necessary to train, spend every free period getting in reps and so on... Then one coach told me "you could wrestle D1" which i immediately dismissed - having never been that flattered before in my life. This set me up to know the goals were never too high if you had the time and resources to metallurgy them into reality.
That summer I trained harder than ever to prepare for college competition. I was aware of the huge delta in fitness and the competition these guys had in the room on a daily basis. I was a meathead - no way about it given the sleeves cut off my tees. I love the persona I could assume and the focus no one else could have.
Well, cut to a day of freshman-year practice: Kevin Norstrem slams me so hard I wished I broke my collarbone. But no, it was perfectly fine, I was a pussy, and I sucked at wrestling compared to these guys. Still, I saw my own progress and I dared to believe the dreams of stardom that the coaches fed us. And I chased it.
I had sword rough bumps that hurt but never shattered my ego. The latter would have probably been better for me in the long run if I truly humbled myself and trained retrospectively with my own cringe taped losses. Instead, I avoided facing any failure I had and my style reeked of someone that didn't want to perform with any action taking place whatsoever - I'd rather just have the match be over with minimal interaction altogether. So I never improved where I needed to improve because I reached a starter position too soon and I didn't cope with the losses as somewhere I had room to improve. This continued.
One tragic Interruption from family life further enabled this and turned my diluted chased dreams into using the sport to avoid the reality of my performance and direction in life. I even continued to have stellar feats to this effect where my solution was exercise instead of film-study. As an wiser competitor, I eventually returned to the righteous path of self-improvement and reflection to chase the original vision. Regardless, I gradually understood I probably wouldn't even be a starter at the rate I was improving.
When I had a bittersweet goodbye to sport, I took away a promise that will use this experience of missteps and delusion to be more efficacious in my future by focusing more on whatever goal matters to me. As such, my decision shortly after the season to call my 4th year my final year was an act of proactively focusing my time on my senior project of hypersonics and further engineering.
In the meantime, I took my all-in unadulterated passion for engineering through highly successful years of engineering. And I incorporated my prior lesson by aggressively gaining awareness of the externalities that may ever nullify my fully-engaged efforts in a willfully ignorant era. As I compare myself to a duck: I keep a cool face as I check above water even if I'm paddling all night.
This faint self-awarrness of my life as an engineer reaching an end of I wanted to pursue the life that would fulfill me eventually pushed me to business school. Although my future realities remained forked in two to three prongs, I kept the ground-level research, training, and testing-the-waters active until I was hit with a great opportunity. The chance to start a business using professor's invention had great potential to launch me towards my goal or set me back considerably...
As I stand now applying for roles, I have been set back. Yet, I am much more adept at many things - even at recognizing the reality of an improbable path long before it wrecks me. The reality still hurts but I know how to walk the path back to good, better and great. And I have a clearer vision of the work, effort, minuscia, and holy covenant I need to make in order to succeed in my largest goal.
I am amidst the greater cycle as I learn my intertwined, morbid livelihood constraints. I'm this iteration, the tools, rewards, and costs are more robust, dire and - well somehow simplistic and inconsequential. The dichotomy exists because the meaning is ascribed by a fickle spectator who's love can fleets from the destination to nostalgia for the journey as soon as a tragedy can strike.
I endorse the ability to put meaning into your work because the best philosophers have never spoken a word about philosophy, but instead of the truths that people live, which map to any individual's. So, take an assessment of what loose ends must be be tied or cut. Train smart. Most of all, show us what you got.
The clouds came down to meet me as I stepped into the clearing. The odd warmth in my soul comes in silent moments like this when I feel most at home. It must be the cold of the morning that bites down my neck just right.
I'm not walking for any reason but to be here. It feels more productive than sitting at home, sleeping, or even my actual livelihood. Something could be found out here. I press on, creating footsteps in the dew.
Momma can you hear me? I think my luck's run out! I don't know if they can forgive All that they know about.
The rhythm started softly And then give it time... Then I started freaking out!
How about 80 in a 30? Mom. They had to help her out. I don't know if I can forgive - My head was in a cloud!
We don't know if they can see All that I think about... Who will defend me then?!
Momma can you hear me? I think my luck's run out
Jarvis was puzzled. He had done this exact type of decision-making calculation before in the moment between breaths. Why was now different?
An answer wanted to take form but the competing priorities muffled it in their clutter. Now he's off-topic and briefly couldn't care about anything more than the thought that plagued his last year:
"Is this my new normal?" The words slipped out under his breath, interrupting the train of thought... Like the veteran he is, he gives himself a few seconds of grace as he allows himself the moment of sadness then honed a refocused willpower on the question he was asked.
She waited.
The interviewer was relatively patient and certainly did not hold Jarvis's potential thoughts or potential potential in the level of regard that he did.
Jarvis returns to adeptly mirror her expressions as the solution structure appears in the floating space between them. By now he has categorized the type of scenario she described and is listing any magic bullet or shortcut answers and tools that would be in the final solution. Half of the ideas vanish as fast as new ones are listed. The structure of the problem and solution have been complete enough that he can walk her through the solution.
He starts.
