Success

Soon I will reach a birthday with a zero in it.  I will be sixty.  It seems so fast that the years have sped by.  As I approach this milestone someone asked me if I had been a success.  The question left me scratching my head.  Was I a success at anything?  Did I feel like a success?

 

How do you define success?  A dictionary (Encarta) provides several options to wit, “Success is the achievement of something planned or attempted.  It is also defined as impressive achievement, especially the attainment of fame, wealth, or power.”  Quote sites are all over the place with things like the following from Vince Lombardi, “The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.”  For me I think if you combined the impressive achievement part together with hard work and dedication component despite the world’s view of whether you are winning or losing that is pretty close to a good definition of success.

 

Me personally I don’t have any great achievements.  I have not done well with money.  I have not climbed the corporate ladder.  I have not done something that has gained me positive notice that will last for any period of time. I have simply lived. I have tried to live in a manner that reflected what I really was inside, a goofy, joyful person with a sense of wonder.  

 

Success is not breeding so please don’t go down the “but you have a wonderful family” line of discussion.  I helped create kids with my participation in a biological act.  They are growing in a world that is only defined by me in the most minimal of ways.  They will be who they are.  I hope they are good people and I hope their faults are minor but most of that resides in DNA and the conditioning the world has imposed on them.

 

A few years back I ran for public office.  I won by 1% of the vote.  You could call that a success.  But I did that out of duty, not for the sake of winning.  I would have felt the same way whether I won or lost.  If you don’t care about the outcome in a race or a game I don’t think prevailing qualifies as success.

 

16 years ago I applied for a job I didn’t really want. I went in for the interview with a smart ass attitude. Really my only desire was to get some interview experience under my belt and nothing more.  Here I am 16 years later in the job I didn’t care if I got.  Maybe that was a success.  Moving from private practice to government work was fine; it felt good to be out from under the pressures of a small private practice law office. Still it didn’t resolve any deep ache in my soul.  This is just another job.

 

What I actually view as my success sounds silly.  My success is writing. Until I was in my late thirties I was afraid of writing.  Grammar and spelling do not come easy to me.  Seems odd for a person of words to be afraid to put them onto paper does it not?

 

However about 10 or 12 years ago I started to journal. Constantly I scrawled notes about every stray thought that crossed my mind.  Every day before I got on the bus to my office I found that I had about 10 minutes of dead time.  My choice was to get a notebook and to write as I stood at the stop.  Over several years I poured out my heart and soul into a series of spiral bound notebooks.  I was honest.  I was brutal.  I waxed poetic.  I ruminated on God and existentialism.  I focused my thoughts and I carried on page after page with daily consistency.

 

One day a friend said to me she thought I had enough stories to write a blog.  While this blog has been dormant of late I took that idea and ran with it. On this silly electronic medium I have set out over 600 posts.  Some were just photographs.  Some were long meditations.  But this blog is me talking and shouting and cleansing my soul.  I am dedicated to writing.  I am determined to get some of what is in me out.  

 

Yeah success is writing for me.  It isn’t anything else really that I can point to.  Writers exist for the glorification of words and ideas and it is not vice versa. Singers exist to glorify the song and again not vice versa.  To the extent I have glorified the words Ifeel I have succeeded.