Eliminating The Noise Between Here And There

​I went for a walk yesterday morning. In spite of a bazillion warnings online, I was caught off guard by the excessive heat.

(In fairness, all heat is excessive in my world 🤷‍♂️).

I came around a corner on my way back home and saw a little walking bridge in the distance that I would eventually have to cross. It looked so many miles away, but in reality, it wasn't more than 1/2 mile in front of me.

I was growing tired. Cranky. I just wanted to be done. My plan had been to walk about a mile further once I crossed that forever away bridge, but I knew my apartment was just across the street once I'd cross over it.

I started trying to talk myself into an abbreviated walk instead of sticking to the original plan. Then I heard this voice - sudden and emphatic - and it asked, "If you can't make it that far, how will you ever make it as far as you long to go?"

This voice, it seemed angry. Frustrated with me. As if losing patience, growing weary of my constant willingness to find reasons between here and there to give up on ever getting THERE.

I recently listened to someone talk about Steve Job's efforts to eliminate noise in his life. Jobs would identify three things each day that were priorities in his mission to get where he wanted to go in life. Anything that popped up unrelated to those three things, Jobs considered them noise.

The bridge yesterday - that was noise.

I finished my walk yesterday according to the ORIGINAL plan. And I spent the remainder of that walk reflecting on the noise that often stops me - and maybe you - somewhere between here and THERE.

The articles or chapters that get stopped because of writer's block on the way to the finished book, when writer's block is simply noise. It's a bridge.

I think about the dates we don't ask for or say yes to, the times we refuse to have hard conversations or apologize - all the relational noise that stands in the way of getting where we long to get in relationships.

I think about my life as a dad. Parenting is filled with moments when we second-guess ourselves, should I have handled that differently? Did I say the wrong thing? Am I messing them up? That overthinking becomes an unintimidating bridge that we insist on making intimidating.

And it slows us down or paralyzes us altogether.

I thought about all the times the bridges look so far away when they are really right in front of me. Just like that distant-looking bridge, progress often feels farthest when we're closest to reaching it. And we start questioning ourselves: Am I good enough? What if this fails?

That noise so often convinces us to pull back, to settle, to abandon what we were building. It’s not truth, it’s noise masquerading as wisdom. And unless we recognize it for what it is, we walk away right before the view would have changed.

I guess it's worth reminding myself that Steve Jobs didn't build Apple into all that Apple has become because Apple was a great idea. He built it by getting good at dismissing the noise that might have tried to convince him it wasn't.

He built it by building, not getting talked out of building.

I am thankful for that timely voice yesterday. I hope I will continue to hear it. For that voice is NOT noise, it is direction.

If you can't make it that far, how will you ever make it as far as you long to go?