Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls

The kind of restlessness that arrives quietly is not unusual, or out of the ordinary. It does not announce itself as unhappiness; it disguises itself as ambition. It tells you that the next promotion will finally make you feel accomplished; that the next relationship will finally make you feel understood; that the next city, the next house, the next degree, the next version of yourself will finally make everything fall into place.

So you keep moving. And then, somewhere along the way, you hear a line from an old song: Don’t go chasing waterfalls. It sounds almost comical when you first hear it. A strange piece of early-nineties wisdom wrapped inside a pop song. But there is something remarkably mature about the metaphor. A waterfall is beautiful precisely because you cannot possess it. You can stand before it, listen to it, photograph it, be humbled by it. But if you decide that you must climb into the waterfall itself, beauty can quickly become danger.

  https://blog.billymacdeus.com.

In retrospect, that is what chasing waterfalls means in adulthood. It is not about refusing to dream. It is about learning which dreams are actually yours.

We live in a culture that has become exceptionally good at turning desire into a full-time occupation. Someone is always becoming richer, fitter, younger, more productive, more successful, more travelled. Your phone makes sure you know about it before breakfast. You begin to wonder whether your own life is moving quickly enough; and so you chase.

You chase a career because standing still feels like failure. You chase money because enough never quite feels like enough. You chase recognition because being good at something privately no longer seems sufficient. You chase relationships because being alone has somehow become evidence that something is wrong with you.

The strange thing is that many of these waterfalls are beautiful; that is what makes them dangerous. The promotion may genuinely be worth having, the person you love may genuinely be extraordinary, the house may genuinely be beautiful, the opportunity may genuinely be once in a lifetime.

The question is not whether these things are good —the question is whether you are willing to lose yourself trying to reach them; or will it break your principles along the way in achieving them. There is a difference between aspiration and obsession; aspiration says, I would like to become this; Obsession says, I am nothing unless I become this. That distinction can quietly change a life, on your perspectives and paradigms.

I have come to think that maturity is not the moment when we stop wanting things. It is the moment when we become capable of wanting something without allowing it to own us. Ergo, you can want the promotion without believing that your title determines your worth; you can want money without making wealth the measurement of your life; you can love someone deeply without turning them into the solution to every loneliness you have ever carried; you can dream about another country without convincing yourself that happiness lives at the other end of the flight; you can even want a different version of yourself without despising the person you are today — the list goes on, on the positive maniputation toward grounding yourself, that you are still you.

This is where the waterfall becomes interesting, the waterfall does not have to disappear ⁓ you simply have to know where to stand. There are seasons when we are supposed to leap, there are moments when playing it safe becomes its own kind of cowardice. Sometimes the sensible thing really is to take the risk, leave the job, start the company, tell someone you love them, move somewhere unfamiliar, or begin again.

The philosophy is not never chase anything — it is know what you are chasing, and know what you are willing to sacrifice for it. Because some waterfalls are worth approaching, others are only beautiful from a distance. I think about this whenever life begins to feel like a competition I never agreed to enter, there will always be someone younger than me who is further ahead. Someone richer, someone more accomplished, someone who seems to have figured out the exact formula for happiness — but their waterfall is not necessarily mine.

Maybe the most radical thing we can do is stop confusing someone else's destination with our own unfinished journey, creeping quietly as freedom in saying, I don't need that. Not because you are incapable of having it, but because you have finally decided that you don't need to possess every beautiful thing you encounter.

Some things can simply be admired, some opportunities can be declined, some roads can remain unexplored, some dreams can be released without being considered failures, and, some versions of ourselves can be allowed to die.

The older I get, the more I realize that a good life is not built entirely from the things we achieve. It is also built from the things we wisely refuse to chase, the relationships we don't force, the battles we don't need to win, the applause we don't need, the identities we outgrow, the ambitions we examine before they consume us, and, that is the deeper wisdom hidden inside an old pop lyric — Don't go chasing waterfalls.

Not because waterfalls aren't beautiful, but because sometimes the thing you are running toward is not the thing you actually need. Sometimes the river you are already standing beside is enough, and sometimes the life you keep postponing while chasing another one is quietly waiting for you to notice that you are already in the best place.

—Othello