Ambition

It was the middle of the week and I was at gym, as usual, doing a brutal workout as usual when I saw a friend over by a peice of equipment. Well maybe friend is a bit too familiar for how I really know this guy, he’s more like an aquantance, whenever we see each other we usually spend a bit of time chatting in between exercise sets. He was telling me about his experience trying to get a job with google here in Amsterdam. It wasn’t going so well because they are pretty much about as unorganised as you can get and still be called an “organisation”. He asked me how things were going at my work and I responded with, “aaaaahhhhhh… yeeeaaahhhhhhh… surrrreeeeee… it’s alright”. Which is what I always say when someone asks me about work. We chatted a bit more and he asked would I be looking for another job soon, and I said to him, no not really I’m comfortable where I am so I don’t have a lot of reasons to move. He laughed and looked at me and said, “Yeah exactly, same for me. You know I’m 35 years old now and I wonder if I’ve got any ambition at all”.

Those words struck a resonating chord within me, and I’ve been wondering ever since if I have any ambition at all either. A little while later he came over to say goodbye and left, yet that discussion has been ringing in my ears ever since.

Do I have any ambition? Well I know I do on some sort of intellectual conceptual level, but I can’t seem to focus the massive amounts of motivation, energy and willpower to create a systematic motion of achieving goals that is the reality part of realising ambition.

A lot of my life is spent trying to put together lifestyle components which will lead to goals being achieved; I’ve intensified my exercise routine because I have a very specific level of health and image that I am trying to reach; I write here on this blog and in a journal to hone my technical and artist writing skills as a means to reach a level of proficiency that I can undertake a novel project, and a screenplay; I even try to interact at the fringes of certain society groups to find experiences to write about. But somehow, there still seems to be lacking certain elements that are key to actually achieving the high level ambitions I have in life.

I’m 37 now. For the first time in all my long life I am aware of the press of time, because I am neither young nor old. I sit in this sweet spot where I have as assets, wisdom, knowledge, skill, experience, a couple of ideas, and time. The thing is it won’t last. Time is ever moving, and to sit idle in contemplation for too long could very possibly see the sun set on any opportunities I want to create.

So I guess for me now, this is the time where I get to look deep and hard inside of myself and find out if I actually do have any ambition at all.

Padwanna!

The Ambition by Mentalechoes, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.