Splash No. 193 - An Ode to Effort
Cringe
When I think about my younger self in high school and college, I hold this other me in high regard. Even though he was a worse version of me in nearly every regard, I look back and see someone who put in a ton of effort, spending lots of time into learning and studying, first for grades, and then out of a deep desire to find greater meaning. Just as much as the fun times, I remember the sheer amount of time I worked towards figuring things out. I relish the fact that I was able to put effort into something that I cared about. Yet, at the time, I’m sure I felt like I wasn’t working as much as I thought I could’ve or that I wasn’t doing enough, but all these years, I feel proud of the energy expended, the ability to concentrate.
A common refrain among my fellow cynical peers in response to inquiries about dream jobs is, “I do not dream of labor,” something that makes sense when seeing the glaring problems of the capitalistic society. Yet, I see a distinction between work for corporations (that the refrain suggests) and labor. There’s labor in all of the things we truly desire — art, ice cream sundaes, happiness, love. Even though I think of myself as intensely lazy, I relish the effort-fulness of these things, like the mental exhaustion improves the quality of the result. It’s like the IKEA effect — the effort is always a part of the beauty it wrought. And sometimes, the failure of the effort doesn’t matter either. Even with great intention and effort, many things completely fall apart, an inevitability that not even all of the elbow grease in the world could stop. Yet, even when that happens, there’s some joy to be had beyond the disappointment. A tired sigh at the end of a long day whispers something more, “I put in the effort, I left some sort of mark, even if just for a moment.”
I once read a post where the author was imagining a scorecard that would appear at the end of your life, one where you could see how many hours you slept or pizzas you ate or Jimmy Johns sandwiches you ate. The comments wondered about which statistics of theirs would be the highest, how would they compare to others in a given category. Yet, I can only imagine that the numbers would go so far. I hope for a well-thought-out scorecard, something like,
“He put in effort. Most of the time. Even when he didn’t want to (sometimes). Even when the sky was falling and there was no strength in his bones, he continued and it wasn’t always a beautiful noble kind of effort that moved the world closer to peace or understanding, sometimes it was just getting out of bed on a day that the covers were so warm or thinking lovingly of his family or deciding to eat at home instead of going to the corner deli. Even when it was for things that wouldn’t work. He put in effort, usually. And that’s all you could really ask for.”
Drops of the Week
PLAYLIST - february 22 - I had a lot of fun with music this month — dove deep into drum n bass, some Spanish pop, ambient and more!
ARTICLE - "There Is No Moral Imperative to Be Miserable" by James Grieg - fantastic article digging into different responses to mental health and how different characters in society approach it.
POEM - "Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)" BY Muriel Rukeyser - "Most mornings I would be more or less insane"
Donate to humanitarian relief in Ukraine Mutual Aid Networks
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Trying my best,
Nikhil