On Ambition and Contentment

I have spent long stretches convinced that ambition and contentment are opposites - that to be content is to have given up, and to be ambitious is to be forever unsatisfied. Both sides of that coin eventually became unbearable.

The ambitious season was a treadmill with a good view. Every goal achieved revealed another goal, and the gap between where I was and where I ought to be never closed, because it was not designed to close. The content season was gentler but quieter - an acceptance that slowly hardened into resignation.

I think the real task is not to choose between them but to hold them in tension. To want things and to be grateful for what is already here. To work toward next year while fully inhabiting this afternoon.

Ambition gives the life direction. Contentment gives it texture. A life with one and not the other is either a race or a nap. I want the strange, difficult, worthwhile thing in between.