Perpetual Marathon

I like to think of myself as patient but really, I'm not. I'm patient when it comes to the easy things: staying calm in the face of aggravation, or not huffing and puffing my way through a two-hour queue, or not screaming in traffic. These are things I cannot control, events I have to move through. Sometimes they can even be welcomed as the Universe's way of telling me CHILL OUT.

I think that there's a more fundamental sort of patience that I've lacked, and I know I've lacked because it usually leads to some kind of crisis or other. My tendency to become fixated with a project I think is partially rooted in this impatience, and as I look back over my life this is pretty clear.

I'm impatient with the creative process, which is why I tend to get demotivated by practice. It all suddenly feels pointless. But if it were pointless why did I start practicing in the first place? What changed? My love of music? The feeling I get when I groove with a beat? The important stuff is still there, just buried under a heap of frustration rooted in impatience.

And what is this impatience rooted in? I don't know, it's complicated. Does it even matter? Can't we just get on with things, for God's sake? Or do we have to dissect and analyse every last experience until we don't have any time left on Earth? And here's another experience of impatience, the impatience to sit with a problem, to fully experience the constant conundrum of existence.

These feelings are like ants I'm trying to brush off my clothes. I just want to get rid of them: go, go, go, do, do, do! It may work for a while, but I'll end up at the same place as before - here. So although contemplation carries a cost (time) and can pseudo-therapeutic as I wrote before, there must be some value to it.

In this case I suppose that all I'm trying to do is to remind myself that what I'm doing is pretty hard. Becoming a good musician is hard. Reconnecting with passions is hard. Cultivating healthy relationships is hard. Improving your fitness is hard. Writing a story you think is good is hard. Understanding the different layers of how dumb, silly, wise, screwed, great and human I am is hard. Doing it all at once makes it harder.

Then I imagine my experience being duplicated 7 billion times over, I imagine us all going through similar experiences and it blows my mind. It's like seeing thousands of runners running a marathon, the world's greatest neverending existential marathon. It blows mind and makes me feel a little less alone in the struggle.