What's running inside you

 
For better or worse, I've always been more concerned with the care and maintenance of my body, mind, soul, curiosity, family, sense of fun and adventure than the care and maintenance of my car, lawn or checkbook.

My truck generally gets washed when it rains, lawn and garden get the basic cutting and upkeep necessary for respectability and my free time is not spent scheming how to make our bank account fatter. The list of project to-dos around the house is a bit stagnant. It is accomplished in spurts.

It's not that I don't want to care more about some of these things--God knows it would make life easier at times, given that a fair amount of definitions of success are wrapped fairly tightly around some aspect of those facets of adult life that I tend to neglect.

But those things aren't what gets me out of bed in the morning.

You can out-distance that which is running after you, but not what is running inside you. -Rwandan proverb

It's something like that. What's running inside you. It's not a do-what-makes-you-happy directive, it's a do-what-makes-you-alive imperative.

We all work enough at jobs that to neglect those things that affirm our existence in favor of anything else feels like not just time misspent, but time wasted. Time that there is no guarantee you will get back, hoping for some retirement that may or may not ever arrive.

This isn't to shirk responsibility, rather to describe a pecking order of sorts. What's important. To me. To you. But that's not really it either.

It's more like there is a spark, or a low burning fire in your gut that is your soul. And what you do with your time and energy can douse that fire, can kindle it, can stoke it. And that fire is your Life and what you do with it.

I choose to be stoked.