Picture a LOT of Stairs

"There is no elevator to success. You have to take the stairs." - Zig Zigler

Last week I started my full time schooling schedule. For those of you who don't know, this year I'm taking a class at the high school, because my tiny school of 300 doesn't offer anything challenging. So I'm taking the bus there at 7:00 every morning, and then my bus drops me off from the grade school at a little after four from the grade school. (My mom transports me from the high school to the grade school every day.) I was super excited about this opportunity, still am, and am thankful that it has worked out as well as it has, so as I continue this anecdote, please understand in my complaining that I am actually grateful. 

I was very nervous about this school year, more than I have been in a really long time which is remarkable given that I'm not starting in a new school for what feels like the first time in forever and that I know literally every kid in my grade. But it's daunting thinking about my eighth grade year because it means that two things are supposed to be happening: I'm supposed to have friends and have the time of my life, and I'm supposed to begin planning for the future and getting ready for college and the real world and both of those things seemed super overwhelming. Long story short - a lot of factors combined to make me really nervous about this year. 

And it turned out to all be for not because this year all the people that I kind of knew started to be almost good friends, and I even got invited and went to Chicago to a Bears game with my friend Evan last Saturday. Even high school went really well, I found a kid who lets me sit with him on the bus, and other than that I slip in, do my work, and slip out - in that sense life couldn't be better. But there was one detail I didn't take in to account and that's this thing I'm calling the "exhaustion factor."

I knew going in that I would be busy. Nine hour school days combined with regular homework, cross country running, and a host of other things demand business. But what I didn't expect was how exhausting it would be. I've still been getting my nine hours of sleep, but around seventh period I just crash and I am so tired it's hard to do anything. 

After the second day of this, (are you starting to wonder if I'll ever get to the point or if I'm just going to proceed with this anecdote of my life for the rest of forever?) When I got home I went up to my room and flopped down on my bed feeling very sorry for myself and I got a text from my friend, let's call her Anne for her privacy sake, but I'm sure most of you know who I'm talking about. (Refer to Valentine's day essay, paragraph eight) 

We chatted for a while and then the topic turned to my tiredness and exhaustion - I was really feeling very sorry for myself. 

Pieces from our conversation:

Me - "Last night I was so tired I brushed my teeth and then I went to spit my toothpaste out and I had the drawer open and I just spit all the toothpaste all over the drawer and I was like, 'HEY! That's not where that goes!" 

Me - "Seriously I'm on nine hour school day right now and around 2:00, I just hit the wall and lose all motivation for being alive until a night of sleep is completed... and if I spit toothpaste in the drawer ya'll are just gonna have to deal with me. I don't know how you people who have regular lives outside of school don't fall on their face every day." 

Anne - "We do." 

Later me, "How was your day?" 

"Good. I have to go to River Birch because I'm volunteering to watch children, and I have lots of homework for later." 

So naturally, like a good friend I let her go because she had stuff to do and she didn't need to deal with me on top of that. But what popped into my brain was this: (and maybe you think this is crazy that all of this came out of a very insignificant text conversation but this conversation absolutely changed the dynamic of my school year) Oh my gosh. Here is a girl that goes to school for seven hours a day, beginning at seven o'clock. She is involved in multiple extracurriculars, is a great student and does lots of homework, has great friends that she's hanging out with, and on top of that she's volunteering and making time for me. She must be positively exhausted. And here is me, a long school day, but I'm in one extracurricular (for five weeks of every year) and I don't have friends like that, and I'm not really volunteering much. And somehow I'm the one who's complaining about being tired. What is up with that?

I don't like the quote I chose this week for a variety of reasons: 

1. I don't like that it's an overused cliché. 

2. I don't like that it's such an overused cliché that I knew the author without even looking it up. 

3. I don't like that it's corny and carries very little deep philosophical thought. 

But it won the job of the quote this week because I was tired of trying to find something that carried the idea that I wanted and I found that if I can paint the right picture in your  mind, I can change the connotation entirely to what I'm going for. 

The connotation you get from this quote is bad. You picture a hotel maybe, a nice hotel, not a JW Marriot or anything, but a Comfort Sweets, something with a good four or five floors to it. And you get put on the fifth floor with a suitcase. You want to take the elevator because that's the easy thing to do, and you packed for a long trip, the suitcase is heavy. But maybe you're on a diet so you lug the thing up the five flights of stairs and feel really good about yourself for a half an hour or so and then you get on with your life. 

Not at all what you should picture. Instead, picture the Empire State Building, eighty-six flights of stairs, over one thousand five hundred steps. Think about doing that, still with your big heavy suitcase, and maybe three kids too, and you're tired because you just traveled to New York, and then think how you'd feel around the twenty fifth flight of stairs, and then the fiftieth. And know that at any point you could leave the staircase, take a jog down the hall, hop in an elevator and be done. At what point would you want to make that decision? 

If you've gotten these essays for a while, you know that my key value is hard work and grit and what I learned this week from a girl hundreds of miles away who will probably never know she changed my day, my week, and probably my year around is that hard work matters regardless of how you feel. I was tired and felt like quitting for the day and I was afraid I was going to feel that way every day, but here's what I learned: We are all so, so tired and exhausted, and while there is a point in time when we've worked ourselves too hard, most of us are very far from reaching it. 

Honestly, anyone in the world can work hard when they feel like it. Difference makers and people that have success are the ones that take A LOT OF STAIRS with the full knowledge that there is an elevator at their disposal and that they could quit at any time. The trouble is that the elevator does not lead to success. It leads to being comfortable. But we are not on this earth to be comfortable we are here to work hard and make a difference. Dreams are wonderful, but if we are "too tired," to work at them, they are useless and distracting. 

So my challenge for all of us is let's not work a full day and forget those dreams and our chance to make a splash here. There's only one chance to do this life thing, and we are all so, so, so tired all the time. Who cares? Tiredness is not unique. Hard work means saddling up when it would be easier to go to bed, and then doing that again and again and again, climbing the stairs even when they feel steeper and more endless all the time until at last you reach the observation deck. The view of the city will make it all worth it.