3rd
I know because my feet have the scars to show.
Sweat and more sweat. There’s a certain dignity to all work, no matter how you slice it. There’s something about the long haul, getting your hands dirty and scraping up your knuckles in the process. It might be the allure of asking questions you never thought to ask before, digging up unseen parts of yourself and throwing them out there into the cold light. No matter what, the fact is that what you’re doing is part of some larger process at work, one step in an arduous march toward somewhere else and something else. Toward another place on the map.
But just where, exactly? For a while it’s been unclear—and it still is. So why do we do it? Why do I do it?
Besides school finals coming up, it seems like I’m taking a sort of test for life too. I’ve learned so much this year, most of it not in school—about myself, about other people, about this world that my infinitesimal tiny brain is trying to wrap itself around. What good is this convoluted soup of eclectic knowledge and random facts if I can’t crazy-glue it into some semblance of understanding? So this is what I’m trying to do every day. And I think I’m making progress, but I’ll have to take a step back and start poking the walls to make sure this isn’t just another house of cards I’m living in.
I don’t have an answer to why or how we keep going when there’s no real end result we can work toward. I think we do it either because it’s all we know how to do, and maybe because something tells us it’s worth it. Something—most days I can barely see it, but I think I believe that. I don’t know where this is all going, but I have to keep on walking. Because when you’re done with this race, there’s another one ahead of you, waiting for you to step up to the line, bend your knee, and wait for the countdown to grind your feet into the gritty mud. Welcome to the final stretch, life seems to say. Just one of many.
The referee raises his hand. He cocks the pistol, fires the blank. You start again.
