You have achieved something and mainly feel emptiness.
Take this situation apart. Each piece goes in one box: yours, or not yours. There is no third box, and almost nothing falls in one piece.
Yours
- What you conclude from it now.The usual conclusion is that the goal was too small, and then you immediately start on a bigger one. The other is that the meaning was in the work and not in the arriving. That second one saves a lifetime of chasing.
Not yours
- That the peak does not come.That is not a defect but the normal pattern: the goal did its work during the climb, not at the top. The emptiness happens to almost everyone who arrives somewhere.
- That others ask how it feels to have arrived.The congratulations and the question “are you enjoying it?” lay a script next to your feeling that you did not write. That script belongs to the surroundings. You do not have to perform joy to serve somebody else’s expectation of your milestone.
The reasoning. The summit gave nothing because the climb had already given everything; whoever reads it that way does not need to pick a higher mountain next.
- The reward of a good deed is to have done it.Seneca
Nearby situations
More on this topic: The inner world