Finishing the Race

I feel her pain. It is painful to watch. Kenyan runner Hyvon Ngetich is a champion runner and had been expected to win the 2015 Austin Marathon, but something went wrong.

I can't turn away. I must watch her struggle to continue. I'm screaming at her "You can do it! Don't stop!" With each cheer I send, she crawls another step. But it's not because of me. She can't hear me. It's the voice within her, the champion, telling her, just one more step...

I've never been a runner (do writers run - just kidding) but I can empathize with her to a certain extent. "It's pointless…", "Why bother?", "The race has been won."

But she hasn't won her race.

It is important to see a goal to its end, no matter how long it may take. That little voice... Not the soft gentle voice that encourages you, but the loud shrill voice in your head telling you it is not important to finish, You can't do it. Well ignore that voice.

You can do it. You can finish your race, whether it is writing a novel, creating a work of art, traveling the world, starting your own business, making partner at your firm. Whatever the goal is, it is achievable.

Finishing is the great victory. It is a purely personal victory. It is a victory just for you, that lifts something in your spirit.

As a writer, I tend to let things go. I'll download a great ideal for a novel and jot down the first 5-10 pages. And then I may not return to it for another 5-10 years.

But eventually I return.

The shrill voice tells me, "nobody cares," but the quiet voice says, "whatever happened with that story?" So i dig out the manuscript. The soft voice says, "wow, that was a pretty good ideal." So, I reread the original text. I do a little editing. I may put it away, maybe for a day or a year. But I've learned over the past couple of decades of writing… I will return and I will finish. The love of the soft voice will not allow me not to finish.