Day 7: Enterprise

I wrote one blog post last year that I published, though a handful of deep thoughts are stored away in drafts, scraps of paper and digital files spread across devices and apps. Such is the nature of my writing these days - the inspiration still comes, but the ideas are even more fragmented and fleeting than before, challenged first and foremost by conflicting "to-dos" and more often than not, the option of simply going to bed.

I have always struggled to prioritize writing, but I struggle more these days as I do with most things, and I'm just now beginning to understand why. As age and exposure have granted me a hint of the wisdom required to live a balanced life, such knowledge continues to butt heads with a far more developed, though unintended, reality.

I have become an entrepreneur.

Despite the lack of potential for grand financial gain, the more this path unfolds, I realize I am thickly in the throws of the unmistakable reality of having a venture dictate just about everything in my life. The continuation of a journey started roughly 7 years ago, it's in many ways a natural development. At some point, I even saw it coming. Yet, while I trust my path implicitly, the recent opportunity to educate and acknowledge the roll I've taken on for what it is, provides some much needed solace.

I am rarely comfortable distinguishing myself from others, far preferring shared characteristics and realities to that which sets us apart. Lately, my reality seems misunderstood by even those I trusted knew me well, and I find a sense of freedom in acknowledging, publicly, just how damn hard it all is. I know it's hard because I am still new, and I am far too often immersed in my own reality to see where gains might be made, challenges solved differently and opportunities seized. At the end of the day though, one reality doesn't change. For now, I am "the buck stops here" for a bit more than a handful of exquisite lives. That people say "there's only so much you can do," and "you have to take care of yourself" is valid and ultimately true. It does not, however, affect that daily opportunity to set such thinking aside and simply do the work to keep things going. More than that, I know enough to know how much better things could be, and to take the steps to get there. Whether I'm fast or efficient enough is, of course, yet to be determined.

In the meantime, the day to day of my life looks a fair amount different than many around me. I carry a different kind of weight than that which others carry (as dearly to them as my own is to me, I am sure). More and more often these weights seem to challenge each other, often overshadowing the weary bearers below as we knock each other off kilter instead of joining shoulders to lighten each other's load.

It is a funny thing to be honoring such a core calling in work, only to find it makes it harder to resonate with the immediate world around me. I am learning it is not uncommon, and there is faint comfort in that, but mostly I still resist.