The cycle of hopelessness for hope and rest

The cycle of hopelessness for hope and rest is a never ending saga that I will forever be stuck in. The cycle that I am describing is the cycle where people live day to day pushing towards the next largest goal, for example getting a better job, finishing school, getting a raise, acceptance by certain people, etc... We want to achieve this large goal and the goal by itself is unacheivable until it is broken down to smaller tasks and goals. So daily or weekly we are striving for this thing and we begin to revolve around the goal and we place all of our worth on the achievement of our goals. Eventually, the hopelessness of hope takes over and is like a cancer eating away at our peace and rest.

Take for example my life... Now I am striving to get my Masters degree so I can get acceptance from the design field, be offered a better job and eventually teach at the college level. Well one of those smaller goals is to take and pass the LEED exam, which breaks down into daily goals of what material I need to cover or memorize. My worth is daily equated to how much I have worked toward those goals. I am yearning for the time after the LEED exam and after graduation when I can get a normal life back, break the cycle, and finally feel a sense of rest. The sad news is that I know within a matter of weeks or months of graduation that I will absorb myself into some new goal, which will lead me into another cycle that I eventually begin to disdain and can't wait to get out of. People live their whole life in these cycles. Take for example single people who are in the cycle of yearning for marriage, but after they are married they yearn for children, and after they have the children they secretly are looking forward to the day when they become empty nesters and can get their life back or break the cycle; however, I assure you that the cycle will suck you in again. All of these scenerios play into the fact that what we do and what we accomplish equals our worth as humans. We are always wanting more respect and admiration from others and even ourselves, which usually fuels the cyclical fire.

I don't want to live my life from accomplishment to accomplishment and feeling like crap all of the time in between. I want to break this cycle, but I don't know how. I have said it before and I will say it again, I know that God is suppose to be enough, but as humans our flaw is that we can never really truly accept that. We may want him to be enough or even say that he is enough, but due to our nature until we pass into his eternal life we will never really be able accept him as enough and have him be the solar around which our life orbits.

The thing about the cycle is that pursuing and accomplishing goals can be very powerful to our self-esteem, which is why we initiate the cycle to begin with. Sometimes the accomplishements are worth everything that we put into them and sometimes they are not worth as much energy and effort as we initially believed. Even while your in the cycle there may be times where you truly feel confident that your life is moving in the right direction, but is this cyclical motion really going upward like we think it is or is it a downward spiral into death and destruction of ourselves as accomplishers not human souls?

I really want to just be...just enjoy life...just live....just absorb the beauty of the present without always striving for the beauty of the future.