Expiration Dates

How do you know when you have reached your expiration date?  How do you know when you have stayed too long at a thing?

I am tempted to say that everything has a shelf life - but in fact I know that there are some things for which such things merely mean we need to reach deeper within ourselves to grow.  But those things are really the few and far between, the essentials, the things of relationships and personal goals that make life worth living.

What of the rest, the things that do not fall into this category?  Is there an expiration date and when do you know?  It is not as if people smell and spoil when they go bad in their positions or suddenly appear to be covered with mold.

I ask this question not out of theory but out of fact.  I am increasingly confronted by the fact that I may have stayed too long at a thing, may have become one of these people that simply starts enduring something - and by enduring, is willing to live with the status quo rather than change it, because either I believe the thing cannot be changed or have given up hoping that it will be.

This is a dangerous thing - not necessarily only for myself and my life but for everyone around me.  People who settle become people who fail to try new things, who come to not even maintain the things that are in place, that ultimately become bitter and tired individuals who snap at anyone who suggests that they are really doing what they are supposed to do.

And in a sense they are not.  They are there to fulfill a purpose or role, not simply become a space server who is there to maintain a title or a place on the board or an appendix of a skill or interest.  The day that becomes true is the day that they become superfluous to the reason that they are there.

It is easy to see this in others.  It is much more difficult to see it in ourselves.