Killing dragons

Last Sunday was Father's Day. In explorefaith.org, I read an interesting essay entitled "A Father's Day Card From My Son". This was the most relevant excerpt for me:

A few years ago, I received a Father’s Day card from my son Tim. On the front of it was a picture of a little boy sitting up in bed. Terror was written on his face. His hair was standing straight up, and the card said, "Dad, I want to thank you."

Well, I wondered, a Father’s Day card with this boy terrorized, had I done that to my son?
I opened the card up and it said, "I want to thank you for helping me kill all the dragons of my mind so I could go out and fight the real ones."

You know, we all have our dragons of the mind. My old professor, Conrad Sommers, the psychiatrist whom I trained under in St. Louis, said, "There are five drivers that get in the saddle and drive us. They’ve got spurs on their boots and they kick us, and all of our emotional miseries come from being dominated by one of those drivers."

Here are the drivers he listed: Be perfect. Please everybody. Try harder. Be strong. Hurry up. Have you got any of those driving you? At one time, I had them all.

These dragons of the mind keep us from going and fighting the real ones. They keep us from living in our humanity or experiencing God’s grace, and they certainly keep us from the joy of growth. We can’t take time to grow. We have to do it now. We’re driven by pleasing everybody and doing everything perfect. These are dragons of the mind.

Right now, I'd say all five dragons are driving me - especially "hurry up". With all the stuff I'm reading on global warming and nanotechnology, I'm quite eager to start doing something about it in a major way sooner than later. That's not realistic or prudent on a couple of different levels but it still really bugs me that I'm not going faster on all this. I was talking to someone about this the other day and made the observation that it's taken me 14 years (perhaps longer) to get to where I am in my current field (including four years of college study). So it's not surprising that it might take longer than 3 months to make the jump to an entirely different field. My rationale mind knows that but my irrational heart doesn't want to hear excuses. It wants action and it wants it now.