“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”
– Robert Frost –
I can get to feeling pretty self-important. When I forget to hold them lightly, my plans, goals and priorities begin to serve as justification for impatience and arrogance.
My work matters to me. I care an awful lot about what I do. And that care is not much of an excuse for a lack of perspective. Humility is the aspiration. Holding lightly does not mean careless or cavalier. It means that I can hold on to multiple truths at once: that what I do is meaningful and worthy of my best efforts AND that everything I am and everything I do is done within the cyclical truth of seasonality.
Today is a season. My job is to relish it as it is while I actively anticipate the surety of its decline; its transition into the next…and the next…and the next.
Life does go on. True freedom lies in the embrace of that simple truth.
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
– Robert Frost, 1923
DAVID BERRY is the author of “A More Daring Life: Finding Voice at the Crossroads of Change” and the founder of RULE13 Learning. He speaks and writes about the complexity of leading in a changing world. Connect with him on Twitter at @berrydavid.
