When Progress Will Not Come

There are days that I feel like I've made absolutely no progress in my life whatsoever.

This probably speaks more to the pockets of jealousy and anger that still seem to be buried deep within my soul, waiting for the opportunity to claw their way out and make themselves known than to any conscious mindset of not progressing.  But it's there, lingering between the layers of fragile laughter and a placid face.

No progress?  It just feels like my life has stalled, caught in a limbo I had never really envisioned.  It would be easy to point the finger at myself and say "My bad decisions" but I don't think that in this case it would apply - certainly decisions play a part in anything, but there are circumstances beyond the control of what imagine or can even picture.

What does this no progress feel like?  The only sensation I can give is that it is a gradual thing, measured not only in my own sense but in comparison to those around me.  It's as if one is watching a coastline sink beneath waves:  you can't observe it instantly, but over time you can definitively see the progress.

The struggle is two fold:  on the one, simply not to despair.  It's one thing to feel that with effort and hard work a situation can be rectified; it's another to feel that no matter what you do, it will simply have no impact.  Effort becomes merely something that is thrown into the maw of the maelstrom:  gone in a trace, it neither abates the fury of the storm nor offers one a better way through it.

The other struggle rises from those pockets of jealousy and anger that dwell deep within one's soul, ready to leap out at the slightest excuse - in this case, the success of others.  Given free reign, reveling in the successes of others can quickly turn into a less wholesome thing. "Why am I not there?" and "Have I not also paid my dues?" and thoughts even less salutary are quick to enter the mind and dominate the thinking, if allowed.

I try to cling to God, but all that comes to my mind is both how much and often I've messed things up as well as the fact that if things are not improving now, how is it possible that they ever could?  If I'm doing what I can with what I have and that is apparently not good enough, what hope is there that that effort will magically transform itself into progress in the future?  It there such a thing in having faith that all things work to good through God when you haven't a prayer that any of that will ever come to pass.

I am left with these thoughts even as the time comes to prepare to face the reality of the my life, another day attempting to arrest what I perceive to be the slow slide even as I try to find the hope that somewhere in the day lies the promise of something better, a moving forward in some fashion.

But if dreams be the motivator of the soul and those dreams pass like moonlight through our hands, what is left to inspire?