Motivation

Last weekend I took two 13 year old boys on a small road trip to a hip-hop concert near Seattle. That adventure was amazing. But I'm not going to talk about the concert right now.

What I am going to share with you was what transpired on the road trip. The boys sat in the back and plugged in their beats to the iphone and were quiet, leaving me with 3 hours of driving each way solo.

I am no stranger to the road. When I lived in the middle I often took long random road trips. It was easier before the west coast and I had friends that in the impulse of a moment would hop in the car. As I drove I started to recall a lot of those trips and how I don't take many any more. And I started to recall a very common theme in my heart then. Dissatisfaction. I was constantly dreaming about other places, other people, other jobs, other new roads. I remember some people telling me that some day I would grow out of that nonsense. Quite frankly they missed the point. The journey is in the wandering.

Without the wandering I wouldn't have landed in Portland. I wouldn't have wandered through the dissatisfaction to find what I now find very satisfying. People can pick all they want but there is something to be said for those who move through their dissatisfaction not taking stagnancy in it but continue searching to find their true happiness. They may say "It could take a life time!!" Yep, it sure could. But there will be no regrets along the way.

The most interesting part of this road trip was realizing that not only am I happy in place, in my heart, and now in my body- that a lot of what drove me before was that dissatisfaction that doesn't exist now. Now what? I lost my breath in that moment. It felt like the world stood still. I had to find a new place of motivation in me. Not dissatisfaction but of love. That may have been the most challenging thing. It seems easy to be propelled by the negative. How do you keep moving forward when you're quite wonderfully satisfied?

I realized it was a paradigm change. It was a difference in the way I think of motivation. In the way I think of moving forward. In the way I think of what happiness can look like. I don't have to wait for something to be wrong to move forward. I don't have to leave to move forward. I don't have to change in drastic ways. Moving forward doesn't have to be moving. Oh there is so much in this. I look forward to sitting in this one for quite some time.