In Retrospect

Think back to elementary school. Remember it? Lunchboxes, desks you put stuff in, those little coat closets, snack time?

Remember being told "just try your best"? It never seemed to matter on what. Not good at basketball in gym class? Just try your best, and that's good enough. Spelling quiz, long division? Try your best, and it'll be OK. Not playing well with others? Just try your best, and that's enough.

Maybe that was true in second grade, but they lied. They make you believe that trying your best is enough. That if you just work really hard, you'll manage to pull through.

The hard truth, I've begun to realize, is that your best sometimes just isn't good enough. It's not a happy truth, obviously. It's painful to sit back and look and see you have done your best, you've been trying, but it's just not enough. Sometimes, no matter how hard you worked, you're going to fail.

I could try my best to be a basketball star, and never land a single shot, because everyone would be a foot taller than I am. I could try desperately to make a hot guy be into me - or to make myself be into a hot guy - and it wouldn't happen, because some things you can't force. I could work endlessly at physics, but I'd probably never get a Ph.D in quantum physics beacuse my heart wouldn't be in it. Will doesn't make reality: we exist within the confines of reality. Certain limits are concrete and non-negotiable.

Maybe.

Or maybe, we just sometimes get confused. It's probably not true that you can do anything, but maybe you can do anything that you really want to do, deep down. Things you want to do for the sake of doing them, rather than to get to the result. Maybe you have to have a deeper will, something you can't exactly control. If you want it that badly, on that level where it's not even a conscious decision (and maybe you're not even sure what, exactly, you want), maybe you can do it. I don't know.