Running away by pursuing that next big thing

Striving. It's my constant companion. It's always there, a constant hum amid the flux and oscillations of my life. I can't imagine life without a desire to attain some kind of achievement. Acquisition of some achievement is my central value. I don't know how to just be. I don't know what my life would look like if I just was. 

Let's take a look at my current pursuits. 

40 books read this year. It's so utterly arbitrary and meaningless in the grand scheme of life. That doesn't matter. It's a goal to pursue. (Just in case you were wondering, I'm still on track to make that goal, although my current reading may put me a little behind.)

Professional status. I'm always looking for ways to move up, have an impact, and get more clout.

Lower times on my runs. Why run easy when you can run hard. 

I keep track of how often my wife and I are intimate. The number has gotten bigger every year that I've been keeping track. Should that really be a factor in our love life?

Then there is the never ending quest for more, better, improvement, a restless chasing of some ill-defined thing. Pursuing covers up the feelings of insufficiency and inadequacy. If I constantly go after that ideal off in the distance, I won't have to stop and acknowledge my current state. 

The crazy part is that there is nothing wrong with my current state. At least there is nothing objectively wrong with my current state. Not that I've ever stopped running after that other thing out there to actually recognize what I'm feeling. That's really the point after all. Avoiding my feelings. The more they're buried, ignored, subsumed under some quest for a glimmer of improvement, the less I have to actually experience those feelings.