Are you digging deep or digging wide?
Pushing far below the surface, or just skimming along the top?
And don’t be so quick to answer. Give yourself some time.
Let the questions percolate for a little while. Let them rise to the surface.
Summon the courage to examine your life and answer truthfully.
Take a look what you’re doing. Why you’re doing what you’re doing and who you’re doing it with. Who are you doing it for.
Your answers are important.
Very important.
Important, because digging deep or digging wide, springs forth different consequences. It showers your life with different things.
Your effort in going wide will be as debilitating as going deep, but in the end, digging deep will prove to be the only thing that matters. Digging wide, always shows itself to be frustratingly shallow and fruitless.
Going wide is always short lived.
Short lived because when you dig wide you end up everywhere.
Yes, you make great strides. Garner great interest.
Receive countless compliments along the way.
But you’ll soon be stuck.
Stuck in something you won’t be able to let go.
You’ll get the work done quickly and seem most satisfied and gratified.
You’ll feel so alive looking at all the directions you can to go. The wide open plain. Your opportunities and possibilities will seem endless. You’ll feel so alive and free. The dirt will feel so soft and fluffy in your hands.
The work will purport to be easy and light. Until you wake up one day and realize that you’ve wasted many years digging a trench that connects nothing and runs from one unassuming place to another. A passage without a purpose. A trench without meaning. A shallow little ditch of little value and no use.
Going wide has dire consequences.
Going deep on the other hand isn’t easy.
It’s damn hard.
The earth will be tough. It will get harder and harder the deeper you go.
You’ll need more time. More patience and a hell of a lot of brute force.
Unlike digging wide, you’ll live in deafening silence and hear no applause.
You won’t feel very motivated or excited by the monotony of your work.
You’ll sweat, curse, curse a lot, and ask yourself why the hell you’re digging this God forsaken hole in the ground. A hole that goes very deep. A hole that nobody else seems to see because they’re too busy digging trenches that stretch far and wide.
After several years of this, you’ll find yourself deep inside.
It will be dark and cold.
Freezing.
You’ll feel lonely and abandoned.
You’ll look up and wonder why you’ve undertaken this thankless quest anyway. Why you’ve burned so much of your time and expanded so much energy.
Why did you go deep?
Why did you dig so far below?
Why didn’t you follow everybody else?
Why didn’t you go wide?
And then the sky will rip open. The heavens will shake and the rains will come.
Water will pour down and you will finally understand.
You will see the fruit of your work rise to the surface.
You will see the value of the many years of meaningful suffering.
You’ll see the value of your friendships.
You will understand hope.
The power of faith.
The transformative power of love.
