He had been moving at speed for ten years. The goals had been clear. The work had been constant. He had not questioned it because there was no time to question it and the questioning felt like weakness anyway.
He got sick. Nothing serious, but serious enough to take a month away from everything.
By week three, sitting on a porch somewhere warm, he tried to reconstruct his list of reasons. Why this? Why now? Why so fast?
He couldn’t find them as easily as he expected. The reasons he had been using to justify the pace were harder to locate when the pace wasn’t there creating urgency around them.
Urgency is self-generating. When you’re moving fast, the speed itself creates the feeling that you must continue. The slower you go, the harder it becomes to reconstruct the original reason for the motion. The chase was real. The purpose beneath it is often hazier than the chasing felt.
Distance from the thing is sometimes the only way to see it clearly.
I’ve had moments like this. Where the removal of the pressure revealed that some of what I was chasing was the chase itself. The movement. The feeling of being someone who is going somewhere, even if the somewhere was never precisely examined.
He sat on the porch in week three. He couldn’t find the reasons. He went back to work after the month. The pace returned. The question stayed.
What was he chasing, and what was he running from, and does he actually know the difference?
The month off is not the answer. It’s the question. The answer requires taking the question back into the real life and living it honestly. Which is harder to do when the inbox is full and the meetings start at 9 and the speed has returned and the reasons all sound plausible again.
He is back at speed. He has not forgotten the porch. He’s trying to figure out what to do with it.
Some things worth sitting with:
- If you slowed down for a month, would you be able to reconstruct why you are going at the pace you’re going?
- What are you chasing, specifically? Not the category. The actual thing.
- Is there a difference between working toward something and running from something else?
Something similar runs through He Spent Twenty Years Building Something He Wasn’t Sure He Wanted Anymore., if you want to keep sitting with it.
Inspired by a real story shared anonymously online.