A Little Further

[Notes to Self – VIII]

You can stop there if you’d like. It’s good enough. It’s far enough. You met the demands, the requirements, the expectations.

One of my favorite teachers always answered the question about how long a paper had to be with, “As long as it needs to be.” He knew a profound truth about paper writing and life: The good stuff happens right after we think we’re finished.

Just when you’re at the end and you’re comfortable with meeting the requirement, you’re really at the beginning. That’s perhaps why we’re so eager to know the minimum expectations. It’s a clear “end”, and we can safely walk right up to it without going any further. The dangerous, exhilarating, stretching, deep work is right after that. The “end” is the beginning of ground you’ve never covered. Everything before that was a warmup.

When you’ve committed to journaling for five pages. . . it’s the sixth page that takes a turn toward deeper reflection.

When you’ve put your time in on the project . . . it’s in that extra hour, when others have gone home, that the novel ideas begin to fire off.

When you’ve processed with your counselor for fifty minutes and feel like the hour is coming to a close . . . that’s when the good work happens.

When you’ve run your normal two mile loop . . . it’s the third mile that pushed your body to new levels of strength.

The end is not a wall to stop at; it’s a threshold to walk through.
Go a little further.