Better, Redux

I want to be better than I am. Than I was yesterday.

I feel like I’m constantly striving for better. Be a better father. A better partner. A better employee. A better friend. A better version of myself.

Always better.

I can tell I’m not the only one. There are heaps of books on the shelves written by people that also strive for better, targeting other people who want to be better.

Faster, higher, stronger.

I turned 40 this year, and in an effort towards ‘better’ I had the theme of the year ahead for me be ‘deep focus’. What better way to be better than to be better better than I was better last year.

Really, it’s getting to be too much.

No, it’s never going to go away. Striving is in my nature, and where I’m working now, who I talk with and play with, who I spend time with, so many great people. There are bars being set constantly around me that I appreciate the pull of. But I need to stop for a moment and acknowledge that I am where I am.

But I’ve been striving for better so much I haven’t taken time to truly let it sink in, some of the fruits of that striving. Really let it sink in.

The gold standard is really the time standard, isn’t it?

Better.

Sitting here now, halfway through April, and looking back to my 'setting the stage' post for 2020.  Wow.  

Global pandemic since then. Yikes. And there is terrible loss of life.  Any life, cut shorter than it otherwise might have gone, is a tragedy. Looking back to my own life, it's the cutting short of potential that's always hit hardest. Yet I find myself also looking at some of the amazing things that this global pandemic represents.

A shared experience of sorts, split of course by classes and circumstance, but some overlap in adversary for everybody. That's remarkable.

Still, I find myself coming out of a dormant phase again.  I got derailed somewhere along the way and recoiled.  I'm coming out of it now, by making concessions to myself.  Telling myself I need to go easy on myself.

Go easy on yourself.

I better head off to sleep now.  I'll have to revisit this in the morning.  Maybe it's then that I should write.

I'm going to stop censoring myself. I was going to let this slip into silence, and just not post it, or make it private, but what better place for the rambling of a wee bit tired mind than some dusty corner of the internet, not even linked by way of a 'webring'.

I can picture some data archaeologist one day extracting the text from some long forgotten database and trying to make sense of one person's experience that's long stopped 'experiencing'.

What an ugly-beautiful thing life is.

Peace,

Shane Fera

TL; DR
Better better by bettering less.