We’ve all had our ideas since childhood of what a successful life would look like. We often find comfort in the fact that we’ve achieved “some measure of success”. But what is that standard measurement by which we gauge our lives on, and who calibrated it anyway?
It would appear to me from the sheer volume of commercials on tv about anxiety and anti-depression medications that to some extent it just might be the measuring stick that’s broken and not us. We drive ourselves crazy trying to make all the things we have chosen in our lives work in the way we think they should, but it’s a slippery proposition because others are trying to do the same with us.
There’s a line by the classic rock group Jethro Tull: “You were bred for humanity, and sold to society”. It speaks to how our choices in life have been based on everyone else’s ideals until one day we realize we are completely disconnected from our authentic self. It would seem to me that this disconnection is a primary driver of the genuine chemical imbalances that lead to so much stuffering.
We’ve all had bad experiences, and if you’re reading this then maybe you can draw strength from the fact that in spite of them you have gone on to live another day. How many times have you said or thought: “If only I could go back, I’d have done it differently.” The thing that so many of us don’t realize is that we don’t have to “go back” and we don’t have to live with regret. The past continually presents itself to us in the current moment giving us endless opportunities to do it differently, and endless opportunities to heal.
Rather than letting those bad experiences bring you down, look instead for how they might be presenting themselves to you again in this very moment. For every experience that has brought you down is a lesson waiting to be realized and lift you back up.
In other words, life is nothing but a series of lessons that keep manifesting over and over in different ways until we learn them and move on to the next set of lessons. By recognizing those lessons as they show up in our lives Now, “knowing what we know now” we are free to find that “best way” for us to handle a situation. In doing so, we heal those past wounds and graduate to new experiences from a new, more skillful platform.
So what if we change the definition of success? What if it’s no longer the superficial, third-party judgment of “works and plays well with others” or “is a productive member of society” and instead becomes “is deeply in touch with their authentic self”? Then how would we measure success?
It would seem that instead of molding our selves to meet the needs of society, we would have a society that would organically rise to meet the needs of us. The stress and pressure in our lives that result from “needing to prove my worth and value” would shift to an enthusiastic experience of life resulting from “celebrating my worth and value”. From this place of fulfillment, the need for measuring our success would cease to be relevent.
Success is nothing more than a successful experience. With that new definition, there can be no more “bad” experiences, only opportunities to embrace our authentic selves and address situations from a more empowered perspective.
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