On Success
Talking with a friend who resonated with my last post on failure, we discussed success and how we define it. The two, success and failure, seem so intertwined. Perhaps only a whisper separates them, a whisper that comes in the early morning before the sun rises, before the first bird chirps. A whisper that determines will you rise with confidence, start writing, tackle the task list? Or will you feel the heaviness of defeat on your chest as you first awaken before your eyes really open? One whisper may determine whether the early rays of light give you confidence or despair.
Success isn’t confidence. I see the conflation in the last paragraph, but that is misleading. Success is . . . I do not know how to complete that sentence. I can define success more by what it is not.
For me, success is never the ordinary path, the usual constellation of achievements, milestones, outcomes. Success if often something of my own creation, something that springs from my own imagination. When I find myself embracing someone else’s notion of success, I become uncomfortable. I know I am not doing my own visioning work. I know I am relying on the creativity of other. This may be what success is for me: creating my own vision and pursuing it through my own passion, dint of my own labor.
In my last post, I talked about the need to fall in love with something else to navigate the way out of failure. I have a few ideas of new things I will love. I want to be au courant on contemporary fiction by women. I want to learn another language. I want to complete my next three collections of poetry. I also have a bargain with myself that involves a new job and a kitchen. Having a plan seems connected to my idea of success. Success is not the execution of the plan; not the completion of those tasks and steps in the plan, but the plan itself, the sense of having important work to do today, tomorrow, and the next day.
I expect next spring to bring a new round of misery. I would be delighted to be wrong, but I prepare for the worst. One preparation is new plants in the garden. Nine new azaleas around the house, four new hydrangeas, there new peonies, and three new trees. We could easily plan two dozen more azaleas and only then would the flower beds be full. For now though, I know spring will bring some new blooms.
This winter, we lost a cherry blossom tree. A late snow killed it after it had bud. We replaced it with an eastern red bud. I hope it grows; I hope it lasts until we leave this house. A few years back, when my beloved Emma was just a pup, we planted a Japanese red maple out back after a dogwood died. Emma, still teething, still enjoying the world primarily through her mouth, ate that tree to a stub. We thought surely it was dead. It survived. Year after year, it grows a bit taller, more full. Only one thing: it is now variegated. Red on one side, green on the other. Like no other Japanese maple I have seen. It has found its own success.
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