I remember being tired in college. I was a rower, so my teammates and I were up every day before dawn, running stairs and lifting weights at the gym, cranking away on the ergometers, or launching the boats on the bay. After two hours of hard AM practice followed by a huge breakfast, a warm classroom with a droning professor was a powerful soporific. I remember startling awake partway through class and looking down to see the letters on my notepad had grown sloppy and gradually trailed into a long streak where I had fallen asleep in the very act of taking notes.
I remember being tired in my early days as a project manager. I was thrown into the hotseat when it came to construction management, and for the first time I suffered insomnia, as I lay awake thinking about the tasks of the day ahead. “The world belongs to tired people,” was some encouragement from my pastor that I took comfort in. There was a reason for my fatigue; I was pursuing something difficult, and it required immense amounts of time and energy from me.
I remember being tired when I was dating my wife. We dated long distance for a year and when she was home from nursing school for spring break, I only had a week to spend with her in person before she left town and went back to her studies. We were out every night until 1 or 2AM, then I was back up at 5, so I could get to work for a ten-hour workday. After a week of this, I was a mess.
I remember being tired when my kids were born. This was a new kind of tired. In the old days, no matter how tired I was, If I roused myself for a workout or a quick three-mile run, I could shake the sleepies and find the energy to roll on ahead. Now, after short intervals of sleep at night punctuated by the crying infant, followed by full workdays, for months on end, my old standby of working out to revive myself no longer worked. I remember the dismay of finding that after a rough night’s sleep and a full day’s work, not only did that three-mile run feel terrible on my body, but I finished it feeling even more exhausted than when I had started. I felt like every other tired I’d ever felt was simply amateur. This was real fatigue.
This has been a hard couple of years. In and through the COVID 19 pandemic and all the surrounding and ongoing effects, my family, my church, my circle of friends, and my business have all suffered loss and failure. Parts of my community have broken and scattered, tools and resources I’ve counted on for years no longer exist, and the landscape of business is changing at a dizzying pace. The pre-pandemic systems just don’t work quite the way they used to, and I can’t help but feel we have stepped into a new era of life; forever changed from what it used to be. There is a mourning in the fatigue I feel these days. It’s a different kind of tired; a deep tiredness of the soul; continually and brutally reminded that we operate in a fallen world.
Yet, despite that fatigue, I keep finding the hope to rise again and start another day, another project, and another adventure. Just as the fatigue has reached new levels in the last couple years, there is a maturity in hope these days that’s different and new to me. Hope is no longer a fleeting and fickle daydream, but rather a steady, tempered resolve for a better future; born from fire and fatigue. A resolve to step out and take risks again, even where I have suffered loss. A resolve to see the best in the people around me. A resolve to anchor down In the simple virtues of kindness and humility, and a resolve to quietly and in my own way, bring a vision of life and hope in every part of my life. I am still wonderfully blessed and surrounded by fantastic people. It’s my joy to reveal the beauty of those around me, the beauty of the place I call home, and the immense hope that I have for my family, my business, my state, and my country.