Trains and Tumbleweed

Motivation is like one of those trains that you sometimes see in old western movies. It chugs along fueled by the coal of its own existence, passing young and old through sooty urban industrial areas and scratchy deserts speckled with tumbleweed and cacti. It doesn’t stop, but sometimes it slows down just enough to allow a dozing bystander the opportunity to swing up into one of its abandoned boxcars and start going somewhere.
Over the last month I’ve seen this train go by a few times and I have seen that abandoned boxcar slide past my vision until it was only a sliver of an image and then gone. Every time I knew what it was offering and I knew what I was turning down. Motivation. The conditions had been right on several occasions to get back into writing blogs or searching for jobs, but I was simply not ready to jump. Maybe it was due to frustrations pertaining to those areas. Bruised egos and nauseating disappointments tend to prod some (namely, me) to leave their motivated state and settle on land for awhile, where the ground isn’t moving so quickly below your feet and the wind doesn’t sting at your eyes with the same ferocity.
Eventually I wanted to get back on, but when I hit this stage there was another obstacle I had to first combat. Comfort. It’s like I had been waiting at the train station so long that the thought of a tin, cold, echoing boxcar, although appealing in its destination, was not springing me from my cushioned chair. After all, I had constructed a nice little area for myself at the station. I had made a footstool out of someone’s forgotten luggage and a coffee holder out of little Tommy’s play dough. I had a great system which consisted of me slowly give a pinch of the play dough back into Tommy’s eager, waiting hands in exchange for coffee from his father’s coffee shop. Then I would give the coffee to old Mr. Edwards in exchange for cigarettes and porn.
Okay, that’s going a little zany even for a metaphor, but you get the point. Comfort is a strong motivator in itself.
My purpose in all this is simply to headline that I am now the proud inhabitant of my very own abandoned boxcar. It was only a halfhearted jump in so I was dragged a couple miles and swallowed a shovel or two of chalky dust, but it’s all worth it! I am now back on track, so to speak, and I feel that I am finally moving forward again. I know the wind will come and piss me off, the train whistle will occasionally disrupt my sleep, and the dizzying ground will induce cold sweats from time to time. That is life though. No one said it was not going to occasionally bring on a gag reflex or two.
And we all know, even now, that I am occasionally going to jump off the train. It’s a pattern I have noticed and it is biased towards no one. Everyone loses that motivation. When you’re getting everything you want, you lose motivation because it is all too easy. When you’re getting nothing you want, you lose motivation because it is all too hard. Life’s irony never rests.
Just don’t get too comfortable with life on pause as you rock in the hammock of stagnant indulgence. You may melt into such a deep sleep that not even a train whistle can wake you up. I say this to myself too—my hammock sings a sultry lullaby.