Motivation: Morning Commute Edition

The holidays are over, and everyone’s going back to work. Who knew it was so difficult? She was ready, motivated, and excited to start the week on a high. Little did she know that the night of, she would feel miserable, upset, stressed and 101 other emotions that she didn’t even know existed.

Regardless of this feeling, she got up nice and early- albeit setting her alarm on snooze three times. Eventually she woke up with a spring in her step. Kissing her husband’s forehead ever so lightly as to not wake him. He gave a little smile and burrowed his face under the covers. She sat at the edge of the bed, sighed and took herself to the bathroom, took a shower, and completed her newly found skin care routine. She was feeling a little sloth-like this morning, not necessarily upset, or demotivated- but her head was just not in the game. Even so, her muscle memory took her into the kitchen, preparing the rice for her husband’s lunch and scraped the remainder of yesterday’s rice into a tub for herself. She poured her favourite yukari rice seasoning on it, threw it into her bag with a banana and an orange. Kissing her husband goodbye, she set out. Ready for a day full of sunshine, happiness…. and what felt like a wall of humidity slamming into her as she approached the exit of her building.

Mask on. Head down. Book open. She stood on the train, not reading but gazing into nothingness. Thinking about nothing. Her stop came, and she got off. Changing trains, she stood silently waiting for it to leave.

---

Sometimes we set ourselves up to fail. Sometimes we go through life, and we try our best to do everything and consequently, achieve nothing. When this happens, we often get low, maybe cry a little, feel a little melancholy and pity ourselves. Sometimes we feel nothing, and it’s just empty. That’s how she felt, empty.

She was lucky enough to find a seat. Oh, I thought everyone would be back at work. Why is the train empty? She thought to herself, but it didn’t really resonate with her. Taking her rightful place on the end of a row, she cuddled her bag, and stared blankly at nothing. Trying to remember that she actually had a job to do, she would occasionally look up at the electronic screens to confirm that she hadn’t missed her stop. She hadn’t.

---

You know, sometimes we blame others for feeling so bad, as if it were somehow their fault that we feel the way we do. Sometimes, we don’t blame anyone, and we just hate the world. Sometimes, we don’t know what’s wrong and we feel a ball of emotions that are attached to nothing, and so we lash out at whatever or whoever is closest. Sometimes even ourselves.

It’s hard to stay motivated, especially when you don’t enjoy what you do. It’s really difficult to stay focused. It’s not that she didn’t enjoy her job. She loved meeting new people and teaching her students' enthusiastic, young, carefree minds about the world. There was so much out there, so much more than just the little island they lived on, albeit a beautiful one. But something wasn’t sitting right. Was it because it was the first day back from the holidays? Or was it because I stayed up all night winning at Catan? It was neither, it was simply the fact that she still felt as if the holidays hadn’t ended. The mental preparation just wasn’t there, it hadn’t been done – partially because she stayed up all night playing Catan, but mostly because she didn’t take the time to adjust herself into a working mindset.

But I don’t want to go to work. I don’t even like work. She huffed and puffed to herself for the entire commute. She knew she was lying. She knew she enjoyed work, she was just being a bit of a baby and refusing to adult. It didn’t matter anyway, her stop came and she got off the train. With every step, she got closer to work. With every distraction she thought about how much she didn’t want to go. Life didn’t stop for her, nor does it stop for anything or anyone else. Sometimes, regardless of how you feel, you just have to do it.

And that's all there is to it, the unfortunate moral of the story. The road to a not so happy life.