THE PATH
It couldn’t bear the weight
You gave one thing everything – the career, the cause, the person, the number you had to keep climbing. You arranged your whole life around it, sure that getting there would make all the rest worthwhile.
The thing was not the mistake. It was, and perhaps still could be, a real good. The mistake was how much you asked of it. No single thing can carry the weight of a life, however good it is, so when you finally grasped what you had been reaching for all this time, it felt as if it collapsed under the weight of your expectations. That hollowing-out you felt was real, and the failure was not your choice of good, but the height you raised it to.
In your disappointment, the temptation is to turn on the thing – to decide it was a lie all along, and you a fool for caring. Shame follows fast, tempting us to over-react and expel the good along with the bad. But the good was never the problem – the load you asked it to carry was, and in the seeing that this was always the truth, the lie dies along with the shame. You need not want it less, only to stop asking it to be more than it can be.
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