Deadlines, being what they are, are both blessings and curses simultaneously. Setting a deadline may work in your favor one moment, and then work against you in the next. Motivation, being the fickle master that it is, makes friend and foe of anything and everything we may utilize to arrive at some stated goal.
I am speaking, of course, of self-directed operation. Taking personal goals and working toward them. Setting a deadline can often light the fire under your ass to get moving on a particular project. But when motivation fizzles and discipline is non-existent, the deadline looms, a menace to your lesser self whom your better self had more faith in. The deadline expresses no emotion, only silently judges you on its approach as you invariably struggle to find the means within yourself to accomplish your aims before it arrives.
Man, fuck the deadline!
Except, without the deadline, you’d never have started on this journey to begin with. You’d have put off the beginning to a neverending stream of tomorrows, expecting yourself to one day take up the mantle and do the thing you told yourself you would one day do. If not for the deadline—the still, silent monster quietly approaching with zero regard for your effort and feelings—you’d still be thinking about getting started.
But now here you are, a fast-approaching deadline and not nearly the kind of progress you anticipated. Feelings of failure and despair arise as the deadline continues to approach, heedless of the drain on your soul it causes as it nears. The deadline will come and go without a word, a glance, a voice, but you’ll give it a voice in your self-immolation for having unsuccessfully committed to doing the thing you set out to do.
The question is, is it, in fact, unsuccessful? I mean, you fuckin’ started doing the thing. And maybe you didn’t end up where you wanted by the time you expected, but that doesn’t mean you failed. Completely abandoning the thing is failure. Nay, you have the beginnings of something, something you can pick right up where you left off and continue with. All you need to get started once again is a new deadline!
And so it begins, all over again …
Anyway, here’s a poster of the sexy @sabreaphenix inspired from her set Into the Sunset:
