Later, The Food Gets Cold
Don't shorten your life waiting for something better to come along.
Something often said about life is it is a waiting game. We work all our childhood to go to college, do a trade, or get a full-time job. We stay at jobs we don’t like in hopes of a better future. We delay chasing our dreams until the right moments finally align.
Our culture has become built on optimization. No longer do we seek to maximize moments. We fine-tune trying to game death with various supplements, wearables, and light exposure rather than maximizing our days. We put our dreams on hold with the plan that one day the right moment to start will finally come around. One day, we might finally get around to living.
But here’s the thing: later, the food will get cold.
Later, things change, and you no longer feel the same excitement. Later, the courage you had to move to a new city and chase your dream job washes away. Later, the passion you had behind training for a new fitness pursuit dies. Later, creating the writing or videos you always dreamed of no longer has the same appeal. The idea of chasing down your dream dies a slow death.
The real threat to our lives is not the perfectly optimized moment never coming along, the real threat is never realizing that the perfect moment never comes.
I wish I could say I have always found the right time to begin, but I never have. Instead, I have realized that life is a series of moments, seasons, or even waves. Described in the Courage To Be Disliked,
“Life is a series of moments, and neither the past nor the future exist. You are trying to give yourself a way out by focusing on the past and the future. What happened in the past has nothing whatsoever to do with your here and now, and what the future may hold is not a matter to think about here and now.”
Our futures are always shrinking. The more time we spend planning and plotting, the smaller our future becomes. I have been thinking a lot about the waves of life. The here and the now. Less about the future and more about trying to be the best at where I am now.
At first, when I graduated college, I assumed you sat in the ocean of life, waiting for the right wave to come, ignoring all the waves that broke near you. I saw life as a waiting game. I was drowning in this ideal, and everything around me showed me that the best years were not now. They were to come.
All I could do was sit on my surfboard and hang on to a few things that floated around me. A few pieces of seaweed or wreckage symbolize the small joys like the promotion at work, a new lifting PR, or my friends finally moving to the city. I tried to keep my board above water in hopes of finally catching the big wave I dreamed of.
But eventually, I realized, the perfect wave never comes. The wave that scooped me up and took me to some grandiose goal that I had always dreamed of didn’t exist. I began to see we must catch the small waves of inspiration, passion, and commitment that break all around us. The waves in the here and now.
In the beginning, some waves are 10 feet tall and are everything to us. We catch it at the perfect moment. And we feel as if we can ride it forever. When I began writing, I knew I had to seize it and ride the wave for as long as I could. When I started CrossFit, I couldn’t wait any longer. I had already priced in the growing pains, the embarrassing moments that may come when trying to learn a new sport. I realized I wouldn’t always have flexibility with my work hours or the patience and time to drive 35 minutes after work to go workout.
My ideas, passions, and excitement were bound to die if I didn’t seize the moment. Somewhere down the line, my responsibilities will grow greater, my time will become less, and the food will get cold. The inspiration I once had would crash into to the shore, never to be seen again because I have never found two waves to be the same. I get older, and I change. The things I love become the things I once loved. But I learn from them, and I enjoy them. I try to be the best at riding that current wave each day, no matter how small my waves, or actions, may seem. As C.S. Lewis says,
“Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.”
And yes, I may not be riding the 100-foot wave I dreamed of as a child or the one that would leave everyone in awe, but I try to be the best at what lies six inches in front of me. I ride the waves knowing that these 10-foot waves get me to the 25-foot waves, then the 50-foot waves, and eventually, the 100-foot waves.
I try not to shorten my life by waiting for something better to come along or wasting it fully optimizing for the best moment. The purest form of life is not the future, it is the present moment.
Each wave offers a chance to get to where we want to be. The best don’t achieve their goals by waiting. They live and ride the waves. I remind myself of this quote from the movie The Sacrifice,
“All my life I’ve been going around waiting for something as if the living I’ve done, so far, hasn’t actually been real life.”
Real life is more than waiting for those 100-foot waves. Real life is riding the 10-foot and 20-foot waves because if you are forever waiting for those 100-foot waves, the food goes cold.
Appreciate your time. Let me know what you think with a like or comment.
-Scantron
Liked this one !