certainty
by Molly Mielke
I’ve always been a pretty goal-oriented person — but mostly because I frame my goals on a salvation scale. It’s not enough for achieving a thing to offer me exactly what I want — my brain craves anything I aim for to hold the key to everything that I need. As diabolical as this sounds, it’s extremely effective. With stakes that high, I’m willing to pull out all the stops. Failure just doesn’t feel like an option. By telling myself that whatever I’m reaching for will essentially allow me to achieve nirvana, I guarantee that motivation will never be in short supply.
But with that comes the feeling that anything but progressing through life at warp speed is probably proof that you’re doing something deeply wrong.
In my case, I want things to feel hard. How else will I know that I’m making progress? In practice, this sentiment easily leads to self-sabotage. It encourages me to pick projects and people that give my overactive brain a silly sudoku-like game to play while matching my mind’s stock image of “meaningfulness.”
Your brain might be able to whip up a five-page single-spaced essay outlining exactly what you want and need in extensive detail, but your heart will always have the last word (and trust me, they will fit on a post-it).
We seem to be afraid brevity might make us look unintelligent or uninformed. Over-intellectualizing our decisions to signal we understand the complexity of the world is now the new norm.
it’s a good sign when things feel remarkably simple and wordlessly right. And when they do, it’s interesting to look around and notice how incredibly irrelevant speed is.