Calling All Strivers
I’m a trier. If you peeled away the flesh and dug inside my bones, you’d find a never-resting, fluttering chaotic mess of WANT-TOs, HAVE-TOs, and NEED-TOs balled up around themselves. For all the things I’m not (and there are many), and all the things I am (though there are several that I wish I weren’t), this one thing they could carve upon my tombstone: “A striver is resting here.” It would be, at once, both gloriously and painfully true.
Give me a goal... a number to hit... a bar to touch... a line to cross... and I get happy. Stupid, crazy, blood-bolting-through-my-veins happy. Reaching is my modus operandi. And I must admit, the inborn inclination has served me beyond well.
Except...
Sometimes the ever-upward-onward mindset can get in the way. Like a dog that always needs to go outside to pee, the urging pesters. And the precious present pays the price. (Note to self -- strive to keep the striving gene in check.)
One of the women I play doubles with arrived at the tennis court one day without a hello-how-are-you. “My striving is killing my marriage!” she screamed as she pulled her racket from her bag and jogged to join us.
"NO WAY!!" "What's wrong with HIM?!” I responded. The four of us warmed-up laughing, internally businessing as usual—plotting a way to win.
We aspirants know each other. We recognize through the glass as if it were a mirror, the locked jaw. The bulging vein on the side of the neck. The laser focused eyes. The motor that’s still humming even when the vehicle is in park. We meet one another in the fiery middle of a-hard-to-put-your-finger-on hunger. That place where do more, see more, be more - and be more better - meet. We breathe the same intoxicating air.
For years I’ve kept a file on my laptop titled “Compost.” In there, I toss random thoughts and ideas I want to dig into when time and space allow. Sometimes what goes in there is a sentence. Sometimes it’s a paragraph. Sometimes it’s a question that simply will not leave me alone. The file has become, over time, a pile of stuff that helps me grow.
If it feeds me, I imagined it might also be a source of nutrition for somebody else. So, I began turning the pieces and parts from the file into thoughtfully organized (a squiggly mouthed emoji belongs here) blogs. And now I’ve raked a bunch of the blogs together to form a thoughtfully organized (TWO squiggly mouthed emojis) book. A collection of stories about human nature... the terrain we navigate... the people we walk and crawl and run and jump with... the moments that make us wiggle, wonder and weep. A heap of “hmmmmms” that help us triers toe the striving line.
During the publishing process, the person whose business it is to know asked me who the writing was for.
“Me?” I remember almost saying. “I write to figure out what I don’t understand.”
Quickly thinking, however, that I could surely come up with a finer response (one that wasn’t quite so apparent), I sought clarification. “Do you mean who is the intended audience?”
“Yeah, who would your avatar be?” she said.
After shuffling through the boxes we typically put people in - none of which seemed to be an accurate fit – my more revolutionary response arrived, “Strivers. This book is for people whose Venn-diagram circles overlap at try.”
And so the through-line formed.
The Compost File.............................is Coming Soooooooon!
P.S. Don’t Stop Me Now!