If you're coasting, you're going downhill

I had a houseful of young family members visiting over the weekend and I found their exuberance for life exhilarating. Two were laying plans to spend half a year teaching in Eastern Europe, another was interested in discovering – firsthand – the social evolution underway in China. Another talked about heading west toward the mountains; his plans made me think about the pioneers of the late 1800s, the ones who broke sod and homesteaded in order to build up the rural communities that now dot the countryside. Another still was updating his resume; it had taken him four months after joining a Fortune 500 corporation to discover no real purposefulness could be found in spending his days at this, his first post-collegiate employer.

I can contrast the exuberance for life I witnessed this weekend with attitudes I see and hear everyday from people twenty or thirty years older – people my age. Often, people in their forties and fifties who have become disenchanted with their roles in life are too afraid or too invested in the status quo to pull themselves out of life’s queue and change direction. Many of them have already started their countdown to retirement and talk about their lives as being on hold until that one day in the future when they can start fresh. In three or five years, they say, I’ll be able to stop doing what I find distasteful and do something else. They’re coasting toward the finish line, hoping something new vision of themselves will appear in the interim. I have news for these folks. Hope is not a plan.

Of course, none of us have a lock on tomorrow or next year. Not even the young people. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work at reaching our potential each and every day, even if this means we have to risk losing those things in life that make us comfortable. We should never be satisfied with the status quo when we could, with a little risk, do something extraordinary. Remember: if you’re coasting, you’re going downhill.