When ambition thieves time
On the anxiety of striving, and the weightlessness of being
Chrysalis in a Daffodil (2019), Stephen Mackey
I’m writing this because I’ve noticed a shift in the last three weeks. Life has felt quick, metallic, fleeting, silver, knuckle-hard and paper thin. I’m noticing this shift because living my life at the beginning of this year felt loving, sun-drenched, and slow. How life felt like holding a thick treacle in my hands, meaty and lively and tangible, and sometimes when I receive life like this I feel so incredibly moved by its beauty that I could cry. Trying to hold life now feels like trying to pin jelly to a wall. The scariest thing about this Ferrari-quick time is that I’d been so detached from the present moment that I hadn’t realised I’d lost it. I was too strung out and tunnel-visioned to notice the sterile grey surrounding me.
A change in my relationship with my weakness and fear caused the shift. I’d slipped into old habits and unknowingly suppressed my messiness and doubt. I joined an acting class this year, it has been wonderful and illuminating, but it has also brought with it new groups of people, new expectations, new pressures and above all a new desire to fit in. With these new pressures, I’ve found myself preening, hiding, and redefining. I’ve allowed the persecutory, armoured mind that drives ambition to take the wheel and decide how I step.
Whilst acting is an exercise in dissolving ego and welcoming vulnerability, there are layers and angles to that vulnerability. I might be comfortable messing up a scene in front of a new room of people, but am I happy telling them how scary and isolating I’ve found the new space? Could I reveal to them how worried I’ve been about not fitting in? Could I reveal how important it is to me that this new limb in my life grows and doesn’t get taken away from me? Could I reveal those things to myself?
Thinking about this tango with honesty has reminded me how my ambition can assert its authority and amputate my capacity to be present. Ambition asks what life could be, and refuses to receive what life is. It has reminded me how much more colourful and mosaic life gets when I’m sat up close and personal with my fear and meekness. It has reminded me how quickly I can suck the joy out of my world if I allow my ambition to run the show, and how flat life feels when I’m obsessed with outcomes, goals, achievements and acceptance.
I’m so excited I’ve rediscovered my fear, and I’m so excited to have rediscovered my timidness. So much love, depth, creativity and change in my life has come to the version of me that can hold my kindness alongside my capacity to be cold, my confidence alongside my fear of rejection, and my resilience alongside my deep need for interdependence. These sides of my personality work magic when they all pull in the same direction and at the same tempo.
My weakness is my lucky charm. Life’s difficulty is my lucky charm. The more I see, the closer I dance to the truth of myself and the truth of what it means to be human. Moving away from unchecked ambition allows me to receive time in all its weight and colour. Hopefully next time I’ll catch myself before I yield too much to the future at the cost of the present.