Even Engines Need Brakes - reflections on fighting for a dream.
Life is funny.
One day it reduces you to tears, the next day it gives you renewed hope. Or maybe it’s just you, your heart, your mind, your soul, and your body, begging to have a moment to rest its weary self. Maybe life is not trying to tell you to quit. It’s just telling you to rest.
Maybe you just need to allow yourself to sink to the bottom before swimming back up.
Maybe you just need to allow yourself to feel the desperation.
Maybe you just need to allow yourself a day or two to have a breakdown and being reduced to tears. Maybe all you need is to allow yourself to actually feel close, too close, to giving up.
Because after that, after allowing yourself to be desperate, even for just a few minutes, hours or a day, it’s all out of your system. And you’re ready to start fighting again. After deleting the contents of your emotional recycle bin,your fighting hard disk is ready to be rebooted and start working again.
Even Engines Need Brakes
~reflections on fighting for a dream
10 Jan 2009.
Life is funny.
It tells you a lot of stuff without exactly giving you a clear hint, leaving you to search, almost blindly at times, for the correct way to have a correct interpretation of what it is trying to say.
It gives you hints through the people you encounter, and even then the hints are varied.
One day the people you meet and talk to might make you consider giving up. Well, maybe not that desperate, but you know what I mean. Some will hint that you should reconsider your chosen path. Some will hint that maybe what you’ve chosen to do might not be the right thing for you. Some will even bluntly say that you should quit.
You start to wonder if this is what life has actually been trying to tell you. It might have been telling you to stop, in a million ways, but you just won’t listen. You want to fight. You want to go on, and you’re willing to do just about anything.
But now you start to get exhausted, and in the fatigue, other thoughts start to creep in.
What if life is right? What if this is not for you? What is this is all just a blind dream, fought tooth and nail yet with not much reality considered in the picture?
What if life is right? Would you have been wasting all those precious time and energy, resources and money, blood sweat and tears, all for nothing?
What if…?
Then tears started coming before you know it. The tears that you’ve been holding back for so long. The tears that you didn’t even know you had. The tears that although at times they threatened to appear, you brush off without a moment’s hesitation. You won’t cry, you said to yourself. You won’t even allow yourself one moment of a doubt, or even a shadow of a doubt.
The tears came. And when it rains, it pours. You braced yourself to make it through the day, but it was difficult. One word, one thought, can throw you off balance. And you find yourself ducking behind the nearest corner every ten minutes to keep your tears unnoticed by others.
And at the end of the day, without warning, you were reduced to tears. You still went about whatever it is you have to do to prepare for the next day, but you were reduced to tears. Even the fact that you are preparing for what might be your last day, reduces you to tears.
And finally, after fighting it for so long, you allow yourself to entertain the thought - that tomorrow might really be your last.
Again, life is funny.
11 Jan 09
The next morning you wake up with tracks of tears strewn across your face. For a minute you just sat there on your bed, staring blankly out the window. Glancing around, you noticed your gear, prepared and set up for the day’s fight. Which probably would be your last fight.
Finally you decided to resign yourself to the fact.
Okay, if this is going to be your last day, let’s make the most out of it.
One last sniff, you wipe your nose with your hand, and embark on, what you thought at the moment, your last fighting day.
As the day goes on though, slowly, pieces starts falling into place. Improvements that used to take days, even weeks, now happened within a few laps. People who didn’t use to even spare you a glance, came around and gave their support, in more ways than one.
And even when troubles arise, a new thought comes to mind.
“If this is my last, let’s go out with a bang”
“If I am really not to ever race again, then let’s finish with a race.”
“If I have to scrape out HALF of my life-savings to do it, SO BE IT.”
Life is funny.
Sometimes you think it reads your mind.
Because, before you know it, slivers of encouragement start making their presence felt. They came in whispers at first, like the breeze teasing your hair. And as the breeze grew into gusts of wind, suddenly you realized something.
This is STILL worth fighting for.
Life is funny.
One day it reduces you to tears, the next day it gives you renewed hope. Or maybe it’s just you, your heart, your mind, your soul, and your body, begging to have a moment to rest its weary self. Maybe life is not trying to tell you to quit. It’s just telling you to rest.
Maybe you just need to allow yourself to sink to the bottom before swimming back up.
Maybe you just need to allow yourself to feel the desperation.
Maybe you just need to allow yourself a day or two to have a breakdown and being reduced to tears. Maybe all you need is to allow yourself to actually feel close, too close, to giving up.
Because after that, after allowing yourself to be desperate, even for just a few minutes, hours or a day, it’s all out of your system. And you’re ready to start fighting again. After deleting the contents of your emotional recycle bin,your fighting hard disk is ready to be rebooted and start working again.
Because the heart, and body, and mind, and soul, can only keep on a constant fight for so long.
Because, like anything, you need to rest your weary head before carrying on with your quest.
Even engines need brakes.