Follow

Follow your heart, they said.

My heart is sad, I said.  Is it wise to follow a heart when the only place it leads is deeper into sadness?

Why is this not what you're supposed to be doing?  Like how is it not what you're supposed to be doing.

I don't know,I said.  Why does this have to be some big huge, thing, some realized goal that is bigger than the rest of it?

The difference between myself and most people, he said, is that I finish things.  Other people, other people don't  They don't finish things.

This has stuck with me.  But I still don't finish things.

Is the desire to leave, to get out ever going to go away?  I don' think that it will.  Maybe I won't write a book.  I certainly didn't do it by the time that I was 25, like I wanted to.  I kind of don't want to write a book any more.  You know, for a long time I wanted to write a book as a way of being in the world.  As a way of getting some amount of notoriety, of existing for a thing that I had wrought.  Somehow this feels not so important any more.  I wonder if that's because I have now created things that exist in the world, in a small way.  I've authored software that has shipped and that has, in some small ways, changed peoples lives or improved their workflows.  I've proved to myself that I know what are important things.  I still don't feel like people believe me though.  Maybe that's a sad thing to say, but it's true.  I don't think that people believe me.  Or maybe I don't believe me.

Or maybe I don't know what work it takes to get ideas through.  Throwing up an idea is the easy part, but actually marshaling *myself* behind it is the hardest part.  Why do I not follow thru?