SUCCESS...

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Simply stated, as I see it, success is being comfortable in your own skin, having the courage of convictions that you are endeavoring to be the best human being that you can be at any given moment, and exploiting that one quality, creativity, that separates us from the other species sharing this planet. Following from this, I further believe that one cannot experience that comfort and courage of conviction without having experienced substantive failure, loss, and suffering. It stands to reason that the metric of a "good" decision, one that provides a measure of personal satisfaction, which at the end of the day, essentially defines success , can only be understood when mirrored through bad decisions. Failure, however one defines it, seems to me, essential to success.

       Children have no fear of failure, at least not at first. Theirs is a world of wonder, magic and experiential joy. It is only when the "adult" world of rules, obligations, and expectations invades their realm of possibility and potential that the magic begins to be quashed. Before that happens, life is just an interesting journey of possibilities. Anything can happen, and outside of consequential physical pain, is equally as rewarding as any other outcome. Desire, an unfortunate consequence of aging, comes along and adulterates experiential pleasure. As we get older, others expect things from us and we internalize their expectations and make them our own. Living up to other’s expectations provides us our first glimpse of “success”. We succeed in making others happy; their satisfaction in us becomes our satisfaction. We desire approval. Thus begins the lifelong pursuit, conventionally, of measuring personal satisfaction through the lens of others expectations. When viewed this way, the notion of success begins to take on an unsavory quality.
      At the expense of appearing to wax existential, I submit that an authentic notion of success, at least for me, only came after my profound failure to live up to the expectations others had imposed on me. When one sinks to base depths of volition, whereby benevolent deference to well-being, personal or other-directed, no longer factor into appraisals for behavior, notions of expectation tend to be negated. Such was my lot. By the graces of whatever metaphysical construct the reader chooses to insert, I prevailed over my intentionally ambiguous “lot” to emerge with an understanding that above all else, I, under the implicit direction of others, had beaten my creativity and child-like wonder at life into submission. My fundamental epiphany came when I realized what I had lost: the ability to think clearly, to know things tangibly, and to create things that I could genuinely call my own, be they ideas, images, or songs. Sitting here now, in this moment, I gauge my success with the belief that, through this reawakened potential, I have positively impacted the life of others, and will continue to do so until I take my last breath.