Trying

What does it mean to try?  I find myself in the aftermath of an audition and in a void of external challenges.  Certainly I have some goals and projects, things to prepare for the future, but when another person or entity doesn't pose a pointed challenge to overcome, a challenge that spurs some internal desire to rise to the occasion, how does one try?  

It seems very important to keep growing.  Without trying, it seems unlikely that growth can occur. And without growth, without moving forward, there is decline.  I'm reminded of Woody Allen's analogy between relationships and sharks: they have to keep moving forward or they die.  And maybe it isn't actual death that one experiences when they cease to grow, but it is in the direction of death.

So much of life is easy without trying.  Most of us don't have to hunt for our food anymore, or fight for survival.  It takes little or no trying to survive.  There must be something else.

We are lucky when we find a cause and a passion.  It means something towards which to direct that energy.  People run races, they enter competitions, they campaign for causes.  The world is full of challenges if we take them.  But what makes us take a particular one?  What drives us?

It can be easy to jump onboard a popular passion, a meme being spread through the internet or in the media, to take something as a cause.  Or perhaps to take any challenge that comes within one's grasp.  But if we were able to step back from such impetuous solutions to purpose, and ask towards what we might direct ourselves, what would we find?  Is it possible to try without another's pushing and pulling, without something outside ourselves dangling a carrot?  How can we find internal growth?  Or is it a matter of opening ourselves to all the resources around us as fully as possible?