A few years back, I was at a men’s retreat with my dad. One of the activities was to climb a 30-foot pole (like a telephone pole), climb onto a 1’x2′ platform, stand up, and jump for a trapeze bar a few feet away. Having donned a harness and a helmet (safety first!), I climbed the pole with no problem. Getting onto the platform – problem. A 30-foot pole with me on top tends to wiggle. There’s nothing to hold onto, every ounce of body fat seems to get in the way, and in most cases you have little choice but to be looking down while doing it. I could get one foot onto the platform, but just didn’t have the strength in the right places to pull the other one up. After a couple of attempts, my toe caught on the edge, I lost my balance, and pitched off to the side. As I was lowered down by the safety line/harness (thankful I had adjusted it correctly!), a defense mechanism kicked in.
I wanted to “succeed”. I didn’t want to “fail”. I wanted to protect my ego. So, I redefined success from standing on the top or catching the suspended bar to “doing my best” and getting as far as I could. I did this to protect my ego from “failure”, and even as I did it, I knew there was an element of denial and self-deception at work. I knew it was a lie. I had failed. Yes, I did my best, and more than most people would try. But this was not how I had defined success when setting my intention – and expectation. I had “redefined” it retro-actively once I knew the outcome. I even remember telling my dad that I had learned that when you re-define success to whatever outcome is achieved, then you are always successful. It does avoid some pain, but at the cost of deeper truth.
To the extent that we define success according to things we don’t control, success is also beyond our control.
Most of the time, success is defined as a goal or milestone. Get the job done. Make it happen. Are we there, yet? The truth is that every goal I can imagine has elements that we don’t control. The actions of others, the butterfly effect, even the chemistry of our own brains and bodies. A billion different factors come into play, yet if the criteria for success are met, we generally take credit. If not, we start looking for one of those factors to blame, or ignore them to blame ourselves.
As a fallback, we may define success as a direction. But, try walking against the wind in a hurricane, or improving a marriage when one partner would rather not. It’s perhaps easier and more likely to succeed, but still relies on complicit factors beyond our control. Even intentions are subject to brain chemistry and psychological health.
In it’s purest sense, the only success we can truly have is “to be”. To exist as we are. Even acceptance of “what is” over what we want is a success that relies on the complex web of interactions we call “past experience”.
But, we still find that we need the traditional concepts of success. We need them to communicate, to organize, and to motivate – both ourselves and others. In order to meet the practical needs and aspects of life, we have to enter that fantasy world of milestones, goals, directions, intentions, and all the make-believe that comes with it. For all it’s illusory and fictitious nature, it is still useful – even necessary.
My advice, though, is not to confuse it with reality. Apply it where it works and suspend it where it doesn’t. Set goals with the knowledge that they are an imaginary construct useful for accomplishing things that are just as non-real and illusory, but just as useful. As a result, we can release the strings that tie ego to the success or failure of these useful illusions. Accept the you that “is”, absent of any criteria and what must be borrowed to even apply them. They aren’t really yours, anyway.
So, given the chance, I will attempt to climb another 30′ pole, stand on another 1’x2′ platform, and jump for another bar. I may “succeed”, and I may “fail”. Or perhaps I will suspend both and give myself over to experience and truly live.