I’ve never allowed myself a certainty until now. I’ve had dreams. Tons of them. Dreams are soothing and fun and they cost very little time. They can exist in possibility without asking anything of reality. Work is not so daunting if it’s hypothetical. Wait. I just realized I skipped a step. After dream, but before certainty, is hope. Hope asks a little bit of reality, and a little bit of yourself, but never too much of either. A hope is a step forward, though, a big one. A hope exists in the future of reality, in the real world, where as a dream does not. In a hope, there is a future that exists where enough things go right for the hope to become a certaintly. Theoretically, at least.
How many of those things “going right” depend on a luck that only exists in movies? Or depend on a commitment to effort that’s never been put into practice? Or worst of all, a commitment to failure that is as frightening as it is foreign?
Two words stand out from that description of a hope: failure and commitment. They come together rather well to create a perfect, metaphorical, fork in the road.
Failure to Commitment.
or
Commitment to Failure.
The first is the one I’m most familiar with. All too familiar. There are so many things to point at when excusing a failure towards commitment. Many of them are valid. Most, even. But what happens when you go down that list and cannot find a valid obstacle? When you cannot find something that decidedly makes the hope impossible?
The fork in the road returns. Over and over. You can keep picking items from the list, but if those items are not valid, the fork in the road will keep returning. The other option is scary, though. Terrifying, even. Spooky most of all.
Commitment to failure.
Commitment to losing. Messing up. Commitment to being told “this isn’t good enough.” Gosh what a spooky thing to hear about anything you’ve worked hard on. Unless…
Unless the outcome itself is a certainty. Not a dream. Not a goal. Not a hope. A certainty. “This isn’t good enough” is not so spooky when you know, for certain, that it will be good enough once it’s all said and done. Failure suddenly becomes empowering. All feedback becomes constructive. Attempts lose their pressure because there will be always be a better one that follows.
Always. Certainly always.
I am going to write a book and it is going to be a book like no other. That is my certainty. I can’t wait until it’s done.
This time, it is only a matter of.