Effort and Self Competition

One of the nice things about vacations is that it gives you time to think.  One of the not so nice things about vacation is that it gives you time to think.

Which I needed, I guess.  I see thinking and pondering much as I see the sleep which I am sudden catching up on:  you can go without it for a while, but in the end the lack of it catches up with you.

Part of the stopping and the thinking is looking at where I am - today, right now.  Is this where I had intended to be in any stretch of the imagination? No way - not all of it bad, you understand, just no way.  There has been a great deal of bouncing around in my life, of veering from one extreme to the other, of finding things and moving down paths which were never originally thought of but enjoyable.

I wonder, in the surfeit of additional thought, if this is a result of not being happy in what I do.  Certainly I have come to put more hope and satisfaction with anything else in my life in anything but my current career choice and there is no way I can possibly imagine that it would result in the sort of deep seated satisfaction with other things in my life.  This is a long term disaster waiting to happen, of course, because in the end I cannot simply advance in something that is done half heartedly.

I can argue (in the back of my head) that effort is not really noticed nor worth it, that no matter how hard I try it will not matter.  That is remarkably odd, considering the fact that this is the only aspect of my life where I am willing to accept this.  In everything else, I follow the very simple formula of effort = achievement.  And along with this first axiom, I have the second formula of I am really only competing against myself.  If I do better, then I have succeeded.  Why can I not apply this to my working life as well?

Is it because I have no control of those things at my work?  This is true to some extent - but at the same time, there are definitively things that I do have control over.  And certainly if I do something better, I do something better for myself first and then others, no matter what the reward is.

Which leaves me at the point of  a decision:  Treat work like anything else in my life with the same expectations and results, or abandon it in the realization that this formula does not work. Where would this leave me?  I have no idea.  But the simple fact that such a bifurcation exists cannot, for my own sense of wholeness, be allowed to continue.