going

When the going gets tough, the tough get going, or so I heard – over and over – when I was young. And so I did exactly that. For decades.

 
I went to work, and worked hard at work and in doing so, likely made many at work wish they could work like me and so they did and so the going got even tougher.

 
I got going on Matters of Importance. I spoke and inspired and begged and argued in board meetings with men twice my age who really just wanted to do a little good and there I was, this instigator, and then there was so much more to do.

 
I worked hard at creating and read all the books and bought all the right equipment and went at it with everything I had and drew and painted and made stuff. Stuff that really had nothing to do with me and so then, though it was tough, I mostly had to destroy it all.

 
All of that meant that I never rested because, you know, things had been so tough and I had been so busy getting going that I never really learned how to take a breath and so my body never got to stop and then it complained REALLY loudly until I couldn’t get going anymore and then, well, things seemed even tougher.

 
One day, though, it all changed. Funny, in the exhaustion from all the going and the doing and the toughing it out, there was a forced stillness. Forced, yes, and not of my desire for quiet so much as a nearly total and complete shut down, yet it was a stillness of sorts.

 
And in that quiet, it occurred to me that perhaps this the tough get going when the going gets tough (and isn’t “tough” a matter of opinion, anyway?) was really one big story that someone came up with in order to, I don’t know, maybe rally the troops into battle or something like that.

 
I believed that.

That life was meant to be a battle.

Until somehow, in my little pocket of quiet, I didn’t.

Another from my writing group led by the lovely Jena Schwartz.  The prompt: When the going gets tough…

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