Excitement is a fool’s treasure that perhaps we all fall into all too frequently. I am unsure that excitement alone is an emotion we should chase to sustain our visits again and again with something that is truly worthwhile or something worth playing the long game.

In relying on excitement alone, we may not choose to continue when there are challenges or stale moments within the journey, when the task at hand is not giving us the exhilaration we so longed for and when the outer circumstances are not reflecting our inner imagination of validation or result.

Sometimes the most obvious flaws of ourselves are kept hidden from our own eyes and it takes someone close by, who knows us well and who will not shy away from honesty, to tell us what we are doing. I didn’t realise I was being the blissful fool all too often when it came to chasing my own excitement.

It wasn’t seen clearly until my mother pointed out in a low moment of mine, as I was deciding on the multiple choices present as a woman in her late twenties, with many curiosities to chase and many projects started that I have never been good at continuing projects. The comment hit home in a way that I knew was true. I am very good at forming many ideas and I am also very good at not seeing the limited amount of time I have been granted in this life.

This self of mine is very clever you see. Her timeline is limited to a few months. Let alone a whole year’s worth of dedication to a singular project is enough to keep her at bay from sticking through with it and enough to begin a new project to feel that very same emotion all over again: excitement.

Yet, internally, the same self has always admired people who have dedicated their life to timeless work. Meaning, they don’t apply short bursts of effort but the act of repetition, of landing themselves to a singular task, a singular subject, a singular topic, again and again, seeing it from different angles, weathering the storms of frustration and revelling in the sudden light bulb moments that make it all worthwhile again, that despite no applause or no certainty, they come back to this work, just as natural as they eat and sleep, just as essential as their requirement to breathe.

The feeling of starting something new is an exhilaration that I love to feel.

But the true sustenance behind anything worthwhile begins with excitement but continues with something else more stable. It is with our ability to simply do what we do because we like to do it and it is with our choice to feel the pain of witnessing our production of a bad piece of work or of a self without admitting ourselves to temptations that make us feel pleasant but distract us from the very thing that we gave our promises to in the beginning.

The commitment to that something stable will make us say more no’s than yes’s. But in that funnelling down of choice and tempting flavours, in feeling the pain of saying no to another exciting possibility, we soon find ourselves in places that make us feel more human. Not searching for the Peter Pan like youthfulness to go against the progression of time and age; not comparing ourselves to perfection that we often see (even if we know that perfection is false but we still fall for it anyway); not wanting to feel disappointment, stuckness and normality of a human being; but into a place where we become who we are meant to be.

The paradox of choice is a funny thing. The more choice we have the more confused we become. But it also takes exploring possibilities and curiosities to really know what we want to choose in a longer term. And if we don’t know what it could be, perhaps we may be hiding away a part of ourselves that must be more decisive, in order to begin.

I don’t think that the timeless greats that we know of today chased for excitement alone. Even if they seem like they did, I think they were sustained by other things that included and extended beyond excitement.

And the application of ourselves to the task at hand, no matter what we decided it will be, to repeat it day after day, to land ourselves to the same environment and choose to approach it from different angles, to weather the storms of frustration and to be graced by revelations, are perhaps the seemingly elusive thing we were chasing for in the first place.

It was in plain sight all along: we do what we do because that is what we do.

Contemplations

:

What part of you feels unsatisfied with the choices you have made so far?

Are you faced with a paradox of choice?

Where do you long to chase more than excitement?

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