If you are anything like me, you know the fear I'm talking about.
Even if you are not, you've probably thought about that fear you have. The one that you'll take to your grave without cause or reason, having spent a life proving beyond doubt that you ran towards it and not away.
There are many fears like this, but this one is mine - it is a very contemporary one for the age I am. I fear that my life has peaked and what tomorrow brings is more or less the same, most often just less of it.
This is not supposed to make sense.
Having climbed the first mountain, all you realize is that there are still more mountains to climb. You haven't run out of mountains, but what you question is whether you will pull yourself over the next one and the next and the next.
It is a stupid question to ask yourself. It's an even stupider question to ask others.
History is in your favour. Because every mountain the rear view proves that you can and have. But will you run out? Is what pulls you forward a finite thing that will eventually run out? If it does,i when will you notice? How will you notice it? I've been shifting gears up for two decades and where does it go to the redline & there's no more gears to shift up into?
The Fear prods you forward, without exemption. I'd rather face that internal motivation rather than be externally motivated by greed or envy. The fear doesn't need to be tackled for its results, but purely for its methods.
But the real reason I'm trying to ball up that fear into something with a shape is because I have a new question about my longevity.
Can I go further if I just slow down just a little bit now or do I lose steam and fall by the way side?
I've taken a year off from the pressures of work and I have to set up clear boundaries of when I will listen to the fear again. But the fear lurks.
That come August, I won't be relevant or useful.
My only defense against my fear is to be humble.
Humility is hard to place alongside success, but that saves me from this fear. To not put too much value in what I have built up over time and instead start every time as if I'm starting from scratch. To enter back into the mindset of a beginner who does not have this fear, that their peaks are in their past - their peaks are never in the past. To not worry about the y-intercept of your abilities, but put all your points into fixing your slope.
If a little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept, then this fear, it can wait for me to start over.
And when I do, what matters is my next step forward.
--Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you.
-- Kahlil Gibran