Life Lesson: Don’t Drop It

There are huge swathes of my life where I feel like everything is running according to plan these days. It’s like my life has become an endless cycle of rinse and repeat. You don’t need much effort to keep a clock running, after all. Just remember to wind the thing now and then, and you’re good to go.

The funny thing is, do anything for long enough, and it can become difficult.

Case in point: I remember back in the days when I watched Survivor, there was one challenge that involved contestants standing on a pole in the middle of a pond. That was it. Just stand there. It wasn’t a huge pole, but it was big enough to stand on. Sort log-sized. And at first it seemed like such a no-brainer. What sort of an idiot can’t stand on a pole for a while?

But then time started to pass, and you began to see how good of a challenge it really was.

Some contestants just started looking at their options and decided there were better things to be doing than wasting their time on this challenge. They jumped off. Some contestants were committed, but lost their balance through a fluke, or got overconfident. It was hours and hours, as I recall, before a final winner was proclaimed, and it was a grueling process to get there.

(This actually also reminds me of the documentary Hands on a Hard Body, which depicted a contest for a pickup truck. People all put a hand on the truck at the same time. The last person to remove their hand, won. Much more riveting than you’d think.)

Maybe you can already see where I’m going with this. Life is difficult, even when we’re doing the things that seem like they should be simple. It’s too easy to lose focus, or to get distracted by things that don’t matter. Sure, it can feel like we’re in “rinse and repeat” mode at times, but all it takes is something to go wrong in that process to remind us how wonderful rinse and repeat really can be.

I don’t have anything huge to add to this. I’m not going through any crises or anything that brought this into focus. It’s just a thought I had, and I wanted to get it down in blog form. And that’s my deep thought for you this fine Monday morning.