When I was a child, I loved to jump on spring mattresses. But this mischievous act of the little girl was always prohibited. "You'll spoil the mattress. The spring will lose its elasticity!" Being a few year-old, that didn't mean much to me at all. Who cares about losing elasticity? What does that mean? Almost all children have played with springs during their childhood time. I had no exceptions too. You'd pulled the spring and stretch it longer and longer. Most of the time, it'd go back to the shape. But after a few more longer stretches, suddenly it went out of shape. No matter what you tried, it just couldn't resume the original shape and size. That's when I finally understood what those adults meant by "losing elasticity".
Recently I had a few good convo with my aunt across thousand miles. "Girl, don't overstretch yourself. You'll lose elasticity." Her words reminded me the principle of spring and its elasticity again. I was telling my aunt about my updates here at work and life in general. She thought it's a good sign that I was so motivated and all geared up to working towards my life goals (both studies/career and personal developments). But she's more concerned that being quite a perfectionist, I was being a little too harsh on myself and might one day lose my elasticity utterly. My aunt is always so wise and direct on spotting the problems. I was a little burnt out, not only at work but I was trying to have better improvements on my other personal aspects. She thought I was already making a lot of progress and shouldn't aim for a 100% if I was already scoring around 70% in such a short time. Everything takes time and we should focus on the process and not the end results.
I am a lazy procrastinator by nature. I tend to be demotivated and lose track of my goals just because of my laziness. So when there are times I feel the sluggishness has been rulling for too long, I will start to exert myself to work harder. This is the time of the spring-stretching occurs. And I'll try to stretch for the maximum length. What is the maximum length? I have no idea. My only concern's I should not find any lame excuses of not making the maximum stretch attempts. My past experiences had educated me that I wasn't trying my best at all even I claimed that "I'd done my best" each time. So now being a bit more grown up and acknowledging my slothfulness, I am putting a serious attempt on things I'm pursuing, so that I really mean it when I say I've tried my best. But with the hindsight of wisdom, I might have reached the maximum length of the spring without being aware of it. Thanks to Aunt SF. I might have lost my elasticity completely had it not been for my aunt's sage reminder.
It's really not about how far your spring that you can stretch. It's about the stretching processes that make the experiences wonderful and challenging. Sometimes it's even smarter to keep the elasticity with smaller length achieved than a complete irreversible damaged to the spring while trying to reach for the maximum length.
♥ every page of my imagination
