I have two versions of success. One is my “Buddhist” version of success. Life is a journey and that’s what you do. There are no particular goals except the ones you choose, and if what you choose makes you unhappy, you don’t have to keep pursuing it. Any feeling of success or failure is an illusion in that it’s not real. Just something we humans make up.
So we make up what we think success is. There is no objective standard for success. We also make up what we want to do in order to achieve success. Again, no objective standards. The only standards are what society seems to agree on, and even that is made up. And we make up whether we want to go by those standards or whether we don’t care about them.
So, in this version, I don’t care. Whatever I do is success. I have many talents and blessings and it is a wonderful life. My worrying about whether people like me or whether I’m any good and how can I get out of depression is all kind of irrelevant because it is ultimately my choice to see myself as lonely and useless and depressed, or not. If only I could get myself not to give these illusions any power.
Of course, it’s much more complicated than that. I don’t even know if that is anything like Buddhist, but I (do) don’t care because that’s how I see it and it makes me feel better.
Then there’s the idea of social success. It’s about wanting people to respect me and seek me out because I have knowledge or skills or talents that they appreciate and they know I want to help them if I can. It’s about social status, and how much—well, in my case—adulation and adoration I want. It’s about how much external confirmation I think I need. It’s about money, but only insofar as money measures one’s importance to others. It’s about playing to packed auditoriums, filled with people who paid to come see me be myself. People who laugh at my jokes and find my words filled with wisdom.
Wow. It’s interesting writing this out. It seems kind of silly in the way I’ve been imagining it.
I know where this all came from. A fear of being kicked out if I didn’t perform well enough. It’s still with me fifty years later. It’s completely absurd. It’s not even my dream. It was my father’s dream and yet I internalized it so well that even though I know it’s bullshit, I can’t don’t stop wanting it.
I just want to write and make music and dance. I want to learn to blow glass and throw pots. I want to travel and hang out with artists around the world. I want to love and be loved. I want my kids to grow up with the skills and confidence and love that make anything possible for them. I want my love and I to grow together more and more as we age. I want to learn how to be a better partner. And I want to feel complete.
I want to feel complete.
It’s a gift only I can give myself. Only I can be happy and satisfied with my life and the people in it. No one and no thing out there can do that for me. And since I am the only one who can do it, then I can do it at any stage of my life (or all stages). I can do it whether I am a famous story teller performing for ten thousand people (ick) or a farmhand, shoveling cow manure out of the milking yard. Or cleaning the toilets in a prison.
It’s all there already. I know that. I think I even know how to do it. And yet, I refuse to see it. Maybe it’s not that I judge myself based on what I do. I do what I do for pleasure, and whether or not I achieve any goal doesn’t have to change my notion of being successful.
Great question!
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