Just Keep Swimming

Long term goals are hard to keep up with.  It is so easy to walk away from a project that you know you won't finish in one sitting or in one year.  By the time I graduate with my PhD in May, I will have been in graduate school for 8 years.  That is one major long term goal that I'm checking off the list.  A good friend in grad school once told me that a PhD is a degree in literacy and persistence.  I completely agree.  Yes, I set short term goals for myself, mostly because I feel better when I have boxes to check off.  I feel more accomplished.  
Intellectually, I know that getting a PhD is impressive, but I regularly forget it.  I'm remembering now more, since I'm no longer surrounded by my fellow PhD students and professors all the time.  Getting a PhD isn't for everyone.  Heck, most days I'm not sure it is for me.  Everyone I know with a PhD has at some time felt like they are an imposter and/or like they should be doing something else with their lives.  Existential crises aren't specific to academia, but we certainly have perfected them.  
But I won't be deterred by the overwhelming-ness of it all.  I won't let the long term goal and all the work it will take to get there scare me off.  I will do it.  I will do it.  Instead of the little engine's model of "I think I can," I choose to know I can.  I choose Dory's way of thinking, "Just keep swimming.  Just keep swimming.  What do we do?  We just keep swimming."   Yeah, that's the perfect motto for now.  
On a completely separate note, I'm going to be really sad when the pool closes and we can't go swimming in the afternoons after school any more.