I recently embarked upon a quest.  One on which I sought to  reclaim a summer stolen from me four years ago by a life-threatening illness.  A quest I had hoped would offer me the chance to regroup, reassess my path forward, and to simply relax and enjoy myself. And one that would leave me renewed and refreshed upon its completion.  However, upon reaching the presumed finish line at summer’s end without having fully achieved these goals, I felt anything but.

Standing at that finish line I realized I had two choices.  I could either allow myself to be crushed by the weight of disappointment or I could change my perspective.  And, since too many good things happened on my quest for me to succumb to disappointment, I’ve decided to view my current location not as a finish line, but rather a rest stop.  Not an end, but the start of a new beginning.  And that decision has made all the difference.

In this fast-paced and noisy world we’ve become so conditioned to racing at full throttle to keep up with life’s demands and deadlines that we’ve forgotten how to slow down.  And traveling at such a quick speed it’s all too easy to lose sight of what matters most in life.

The sad reality is that if we’d simply make the effort to slow down we’d discover that many of the demands and deadlines hindering us from focusing on what matters most are self-imposed and unnecessary.

In hindsight, before I set off on my quest I should have realized it would take more than one short summer to overcome years of “clutter.”  In truth, I made good progress on the goals I had set for myself at the start of my quest, but the pressure of that self-imposed deadline almost made me lose sight of that fact.

“Life is a journey, not a destination.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

So, rather than viewing summer’s end as the finish line of my latest quest, I am now looking upon it as a rest stop on a much longer journey.  A rest stop that has offered me the chance to rest, reflect, and discover what the quest did accomplish which, among other things, includes the sense of closure I needed to move forward.  A rest stop I will now depart from refreshed, renewed, and ready to embark upon this next new beginning.