After being intensely self-driven, it’s easy to wander. After that structure dissolved, after direction is gone from your life, it feels like there is nowhere to go.  You find yourself in a desert.  We know that we are finished with a central fact of life, our direction, but there are people who never had intense direction and now are not lost. They continue like nothing changed. Being surrounded by them makes us yearn for our direction in this journey through the desert.

We were so singular. We had a goal – we had the goal. The paradise beyond the desert. Every meal, every minute, every mile, every month after month brought us closer to our goal. Whether or not we got the gold doesn’t matter anymore. That oasis is behind us. Maybe in some mirage of retrospective pride it matters, but not now. The meals have been eaten, the minutes have ticked by, the miles have stretched behind us, and the months have since passed. The gold is weighing us down in our journey. Maybe it’s a recollection of success. Maybe it’s a stinging reminder of past glory. Its weight, ignoring our perception of it, drags our sight down to the question before our feet: Am I a has-been?

In what feels like a desert journey, that question rings through the hollow air and bounces around my mind like an angry wasp. A buzzing reminder of a possible, and horrible truth: have I peaked?

Looking around, it is easy to see those who were singular in determination yet diverse in goals. The result is amazing. They pursued so many goals and achieved as much, if not more, than we of singular minds. We so envy them. They make us seem like wash-outs, like quitters, like nobodies.

But you never pursued an illusion. You, like me, found an oasis. You had to leave that oasis behind. You always knew that someday you would have to. Now you feel lost in a desert, wandering, looking back towards the oasis that is no longer yours. You don’t have that drive anymore. So, what? You no longer need it. You learned so much from pushing towards the oasis that you went beyond it. While the oasis was necessary for you to learn, it is not necessary for you. You’re not a has-been yet. The past was to learn how to succeed, that was all practice. Not even practice, it was warm-up. You aren’t different than the others surrounding you, you succeeded like them. They aren’t them – you are one too.

I know finding your way now is difficult, I’m living it. But finding your new direction too quickly would be the biggest misstep you could make. You just devoted so much life to your last destination that you forgot everything outside of it. It was you and that point across the desert. Now is the time to wander a bit. Have a look around, get your bearings, figure where it is you are and where you want to go – and remember, you don’t have to get there right away.