On the Day You Reach It
You are chasing something right now. Lust, money, power, applause, a name that outlives you. The list changes from one man to the next. The running never does. We are made for it, and even the man who sits still is running somewhere inside, so rest is only the chase with his eyes closed. There is no use asking a man to stop, because he can’t, and neither can you. The only honest question is what waits at the end of the line you keep pulling toward, since not everything gives back what it costs to reach. The high asks more of you each time and returns less, the wanting eats what it caught and keeps eating, which is all obsession has ever been, and the prize is already smaller than it looked while you reach past it for the next, on a treadmill that learned your weight. But a man does not stumble onto that chase, he chooses it, because a hunger that can never be filled is one he never has to set down, and a man too afraid to arrive will always pick the road with no end. He keeps the running and loses the one who was meant to arrive, and wakes one day with the whole world in his hands and no one left inside to want it. The empty chases are not the dangerous ones. They are the safe ones, because they never turn around. You can run after money your whole life, and it will never once look back at you. There is another kind of chase, a mission and not an appetite, and the only difference that matters is that it can be finished, and a thing that can be finished can turn and weigh you the moment you reach it. That is what men are running from. Not the work, but the verdict waiting at the end of the work. They will take any road with no last day on it, because the last day is the day they are seen. The coward picks the endless thing and calls it ambition. The brave man picks the thing with eyes. So chase. You were always going to. You will not feel it happen. You only notice once it is already done. Only know that you are not choosing a destination, you are choosing a master, and it will remake you in its image whether you meant to kneel or not. One of them will never look up. The other has been watching you the whole time. It will not ask your permission, and on the day you reach it, it will not look away.