The Calm Before

I have recently been involved in numerous conversations with many of my friends about being in a position of calm and assurance. A few of them are satisfied with where they are at, and others want to be satisfied but can't quite get there. I tend not to fully believe those who say they are content with what they have, because I have rarely been content with the position I am in. In fact, it seems like every person I talk to is striving for something new. It comes out in conversations that usually look like this...

Me: "So how's life?"
Person: "It's going really well I just got a new job that I am really excited about."
Me: "What do you do?"
Person "Well, it's kind of a lower level position right now but I should be able to move up quickly, and the pay isn't great but hopefully if I stick it out the pay is really good!"
Me: "So what happened to that one thing you were working on, you seemed really stoked and passionate about that?"
Person "Well...I just never really pursued it like I could have, and no one seemed interested in helping me, and it's hard to do something that doesn't pay you well, or at all. I feel like my life is leading in a different direction for now."


To be honest, I am the "person" in most of those conversations and "me" is usually played by my friends and family members. I have also decided that this conversation occurs way more than it should. This uneasiness is caused by what I would call "the storms" that occur daily in my life. A storm is a confrontation with my boss, a paycheck that doesn't equal my bills, seeing the successes of someone else that I want, etc... All of this and more decides how whether my day is spent on the boat being productive, or getting tossed around by the seas never moving forward and even sailing in the right direction. My solutions so far have been less than fruitful to say the least. An impromptu job search, a new scheme to make money, a half thought creative idea, or any kind of quick fix that will make me the most successful, happy, and interesting man in the world ("Stay thirsty my friends").Needless to say, this never works and I end up spending the rest of my day on Face book stalking my friends Holiday pictures from their junior year of college. The storm goes away, not because I sailed out of it, but because I gave up and now I am back where I started. It's like I have woken up on my boat not realizing where I am, and feeling more defeated than when the storm came.

So here I am again sitting in the calm before the inevitable storm; which meteorologists say is due to hit at around 8:00am Monday morning, but could come as soon as late Sunday evening. But what if the storm didn't have to come? What if it was not an inventible force in our lives? Maybe just maybe we can control the weather and the storms don't need to happen.

I had a professor at the University of Colorado that asked me " When was the last time that you truly enjoyed where you were at in that moment...Maybe at a football game or at home, but you didn't think at all about what you were doing later that night or 5 min. from then for that matter?" I was amazed; I could probably count those occurrences on one hand. But as I sit here at work on a Friday afternoon at 2:00pm, this memory came rushing back, reminding me to not only take a step back, but enjoy this where I am at. I don't believe that there has to be a storm after the calm. Sometimes the calm needs to last longer than we tend to let it; especially when we are the ones allowing the storms to take place and take over our lives.

 I see things clearer without rain and wind blowing in my eyes. It's time to stop letting the storms win, and move forward in confidence and calm; with the expectations that we are pointed in the direction of the things we were meant to do. So enjoy the weekend...and know that the weatherman is usually wrong.