The Grind

Day 3558

The Grind

    Hello, my friends! It’s been a while, far too long. Today, I’d like to talk about a topic that has been on my mind a lot lately. I want to talk about the grind.
    What is the grind? The grind is the pursuit. The grind is the fight. The grind represents your struggle to achieve something. For some, the goal is something easily definable. Maybe you want to lose 10 pounds, ace a test, or win a game. With short-term goals like that, you can easily keep it within sight, but not all goals are so simple. Maybe you want to become a better person, get a college degree, or reach a certain occupation. You start off on this course with a clear idea of what you want to do, but because it’s such a long journey, it’s easier to get lost along the way.
    I am a grinder. I tend to set my ambitions high, not always realizing how long it will take to reach them. I dial in and work and work and work, and when I finally look up, I often realize that I’m somewhere totally different from where I began. Something I’ve realized in recent years is that the journey is just as important, if not more, than the destination. With any long-term goal, you will never reach the end as the same person you were at the beginning. The question is simply, who will you become? It’s not an easy question to answer. I meet people all the time who never reach that end, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps you realize that the goal you set out to reach wasn’t what you wanted after all, or maybe your goals change midway, and you change course. What scares me, though, isn’t the idea of changing course, but of forgetting why I started.
    As an adult, your life can easily become mired in routine. Day in and day out, you do much the same, and it’s natural to get comfortable. You subconsciously settle in for the long haul, and each day passes by in a second, scarcely long enough to hold onto. I, for one, do not want to get comfortable. I remind myself, as often as I can, to never forget why I started. Do not be ashamed to ask yourself how you came to be where you are, or what it was you sought at the beginning. Truly, sometimes that’s the only way to right yourself.
    Maybe your goal isn’t something that you consciously put into words, but something you’ve always felt. Maybe your grind is simply finding food to eat, but rest assured, we are all in the grind together. One of the great, unrecognized trials of the grind isn’t the difficulty but the duration, the fact that you’re struggling for so long that you lose sight of the goal. Remind yourself, for no other reason than to say, this is how far I have come.