As I watched the month, day, and year flow from my pen’s tip, the date’s significance clicked. Interrupting my wife as she journaled next to me in bed, I said, “It’s been two years since I left medicine.”
“Wow,” she deadpanned, writing on without pause. That’s how I felt too: indifferent.
My new life isn’t so new anymore, nor is it sexy. I write and I refinish furniture. A lot of days, I sense I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. Other days, sometimes weeks, I doubt everything. Not yet where I envisioned I’d be, but no longer blinded by novelty, I’ve entered a dangerous next chapter of the journey: the middle.
“…that’s where people tend to abandon their principles or their practices and they kind of lose their way a little bit,” said Sam Presti, the Oklahoma City Thunder’s general manager (and no stranger to this newsletter) during his yearly preseason press conference. Per Las Vegas oddsmakers, OKC has the second best chance of winning this year’s title. They’re not the worst team in the league, as they were four years ago, and although they’re talented, they haven’t won anything. Presti concluded, “Hopefully some of the lessons we’re learning now will be able to stabilize us, guide us, and help us maintain our position to be able to work through that (the middle of the journey).”
When we commit to our dream, the universe drops a little beginner’s luck in our backpack. It feels easy, simple, linear. It gets us started down the trail. Then, obstacles appear and we fail… repeatedly. As we pause and gather our bearings, our dream appears infinitely farther away than our estimations. This can be demoralizing. Or galvanizing.
No more pipedreams. No illusions. Pure reality. And this is what we always wanted: to be in the wilderness, forced to make consequential, life-defining choices with no guarantee of success.
To the middle—where we build the life we love,
Ryan Fightmaster, MD
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