The Pit
Sean Moore
The Pit
And you may ask yourself, how did I get here?
Maybe it’s when you wake up that it hits. That feeling – like someone’s tied a weight to the bottom of your stomach. The inescapable fear that you’re falling down a tunnel of darkness and have no idea where – or when – the bottom is.
I suggest the morning because that’s always when I feel it. When sleep-encrusted eyelids wrench themselves apart in fits and starts, mutinous over the idea of starting another day. It’s right then, right when those first photons hit, because with them comes the reminder that the stacks of work that remain, the papers in disarray on the desk, the twelve application windows still open on the computer, discarded in exchange for a few hours of sleep.
In one sense, it’s a feeling of dread, of recognition that there is still so much left to finish. Guilt, too – that somehow eating, or sleeping, or doing anything that isn’t in service of making that pile smaller is a waste.
But it’s not really that, really. It’s not a feeling of dread, or guilt, or anything else, really. It’s something larger than that: it’s this sense of why are these things important to me? That’s what it’s really about. Because the piles in our life, the things we have to do, are so often dictated not by the plans or goals we set for ourselves, but by the agendas and timelines of others within our lives.
Of course some of that is unavoidable; life is after all so heavily focused on interactions with the people we love and care about, and that necessitates to some extent accepting work from others. But many of those things in our piles, in the list of things we must do, are on top of what we accept willingly from others, and the work we define for ourselves. And the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether that’s really worth it?