On Motivation

I wanted to tell a story:

About motivation;

About the feeling it makes as it tingles down the sharp recesses of your spine;

As it inches ever closer,

to the combatant fabrications of your mind

Where it is attacked and broken down and fought with every “oh I don’t know” and “I just don’t have time” from the worst pangings that your self consciousness has to offer.

Motivation is like a drug. It encapsulates. It pixilates until you feel the wonders of its worth…

Just to feel the withdrawal once it passes.

Motivation motivates.

It wakes you up and tells you when it’s time to speak your mind,

when your mind is too afraid to say it itself.

Motivation is a moral obligation

To better ourselves and get out of bed every morning,

Even when the sky is on fire and diseases are killing the loved ones around us while teenagers shoot and snort and vape their ways to an early grave.

Even when the streets are paved on the bodies of dead and missing indigenous women and the multicolored slaves of yesteryear still tiptoe around delicate matters near white folk who might not have voted ndp or liberal in the last federal election.

But motivation doesn’t fix the problem, it just slaps on bandaids.

Hundreds and millions of selection brand bandaids.

An entire planet of bandaids. A global nylon scented brown sticky bandaid, floating in space as we orbit our way towards the sun.

I wanted to tell this story but I got lost along the way.

Because no one is motivated anymore.

Nobody WANTS to do anything.

We consider ourselves grandiose beings in the larger scale of the world. We imagine multiple galaxies and our place at the top of the food chain;

as individuals who can talk to one another but instead we just argue,

as land-dwellers who learned to fly but instead just slop around in the mud,

as simultaneously more wonderful life forms than both our parents before us and our children below.

Our motivation to react is limited and it is difficult to overcome our fear for the unknown in a world where we live just to die and face it head-on.

We write and destroy and kill and enjoy and we do it all from our motivations however good or however evil.

As we fight this war so valiantly fought until we fall at the helm of existence and bow before our maker to explain that the life we lived was a lie and that our stupid motivations led us down to our own destruction.

Why would we write a song so loud that we pretend we are anything more than what we are which are: cruel; selfish; ignorant; stupid mortals who are destined to make the wrong choice?

Because we can inspire to love.

And we can work to seeing the good in people over the evil.

And we can motivate ourselves to do better.

I wanted to write a story about that.

Now I need people to read it.

C.E. Zulin is the author of Saints of the Paradise Valley, the gripping story of Starseed, a seventeen-year-old girl looking for answers in a world that provides none. Caught in between a war between traditionalism and science, will Starseed be able to find her parents and at long last, Paradise?

Learn more here and look for SOPV in the Amazon or Kobo bookstores.