Most people, even many hardened by the pursuit of the experience and sensation that is ultra marathon running, lack fulfillment.
What is fulfillment, anyway?
I’ll let you answer that yourself; most people have a decent idea of what their lives fulfilled might look like.
Close your eyes and imagine your life, fulfilled.
I’m going to guess you’re not quite there, yet.
You might have a plan, an ideal, or a path. Your values and beliefs frame a mission for your life, for a fulfilled life.
There need to be some changes, sure: your job (or just your boss), location (“If only I was in the mountains”), or acquaintances (“I need new friends…”). We all have some environmental factor restricting our growth, some segment of our life or a habit keeping us in the same place.
Right?
Wrong.
Way wrong.
I battled the notion for some time that my environment dictated what I could do and who I could become; it was a lie of culture, a culture fixated on flashy social media profiles and influencer hype. If I didn’t adhere to some brand of success or achievement, my personal mission was at stake.
I was wrong.
My fulfillment, my mission, never depended on anything but my own action.
One question loomed, unanswered, over my head. Through every pair of running shoes I wore out, through every lunge and squat and plank, through every victory and regression and imitation of some brand of success or achievement, I never asked myself:
What if I was better than I am?
The person you closed your eyes and imagined, the fulfilled life you saw, lives on the other side of that question.
It’s a question that has to be answered daily—even every second!—if your desire for ‘fulfillment’ is sincere, if you decide to commit yourself to a higher mission or a victory you can only imagine.
We fall into daydreams and wishes, as if men and women are meant to always be imagining some better place for their lives in some distant future that is only attainable through a massive storm of environmental change. We never stop and wonder if where we are right now is where we’re meant to be, and despite every limitation imposed by the company we keep, our career, finances, and lack of opportunity, if this place is where we are meant to take root and explode in personal growth.
Maybe where we are right now is our greatest asset; to change it, to play into those daydreams of if only, would be to thwart the path we’re on toward mission success.
It’s a dangerous pattern of wishing and searching, beginning and striving, and falling back into despair of circumstance.
Break the cycle: commit the air in your lungs and the blood in your veins to that mission, that peak of accomplishment, without regard for your state of life.
It starts with one question: What if I was better than I am?
Find your Wicked Trail…