Continuing after success.
I only have two games on my phone; one is called Dots, and the other is Peak. Both are designed to keep your brain from dulling, but I prefer to think of them as meditative. When I play, my inner dialogue runs wild—like the ADHD child I am. It’s a jumble of thoughts, distractions, and half-formed ideas. But even though I’ve long outplayed both games, I continue to enjoy them. They remind me of the challenges I’ve already conquered.
It’s a bit like how I feel about life sometimes. I keep moving forward, even though I’ve already surpassed many of the big milestones. The house, the tree, the family, the book, the traveling, so many adventures—I’ve done most of it. Yet, I’m still excited by whatever new challenge comes my way. There’s a strange joy in the pursuit, even when the finish line seems far behind me.
Is reaching the top the end of the challenge?
The ongoing challenge of joy is a metaphor for what remains to be done after we achieve something big—something that once defined who we are. We spend so much time working toward a goal that when we finally reach it, it feels like both a triumph and an anticlimax. The pursuit of a specific goal can be a powerful force, motivating us to wake up every day, live through whatever needs to be lived, and do whatever it takes to drag the dream into reality. But what happens after the goal is achieved? That’s when we often face a kind of partial happiness—a hollowness we weren’t expecting. And this is where the challenge of ongoing joy emerges. It’s in that space between achievement and contentment, in the tension between the milestone reached and the next one looming on the horizon.
In a book, in between chapters there is always some type of emptiness. That final point that you see coming as you read. There is a tension and a resolution, the knowing that something is ending or visualisation of white space or a blank page, a number and a capital letter marking the transition. I like to imagine this is the same as that emptiness between an end and a new beginning. The still moment between exhaling and breathing in fresh air. Often people say that a new beginning means a new, fresh, blank book. But that would be like deleting everything that happend before, throwing a note book full of stories away. I doubt that’s the case. I will call it a turn of page, or a new chapter in an ongoing book with one only possible end. We will all eventually die. And that is the end of each and every of our stories.