Reimagining Success
For years, I have thought about the word success and questioned what it really means to me. I understood that there was a larger cultural definition of success based on wealth and prestige. However, I never felt motivated by these desires and therefore felt disconnected from the type of success embedded within our larger Western capitalist culture.
A Daydream from My Twenties
I remember being extremely lost in my early 20s, not knowing the direction I wanted my life to take. I knew I loved creating art, but I also felt deeply influenced by what was culturally expected of me. At that time, I felt the unspoken cultural pressure to figure out the direction of my life, which meant choosing a program to study at university. In one of my states of feeling lost and confused, I went over to my parents’ house and plunked myself down in their cosy living room armchair. There, I stared into space and entered into a daydream. I daydreamed about being a writer and writing magazine articles. As I began to fall deeper into the dream, I envisioned a magazine spread with my own article written across the page, titled something like Reimagining Success.
I don’t know exactly what happened after that daydream. However, I do know that my 20-year-old self never thought about reimagining what success meant to her, nor did she think about writing a magazine article or becoming a writer, for that matter. When I think about why she didn’t do any of those things, I imagine she probably felt trapped and powerless within the larger culture. Instead, she chose a program to study, went to university, and immediately afterward got a job.
According to the Nelson Canadian Dictionary, success is defined as:
The achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted.
a. The gaining of fame or prosperity.
b. The extent of such gain.To be successful.
Given this definition of success, I was successful because I went to university and got a well-paying job. However, I did not feel successful. Rather, I felt like I was trying to squeeze myself into the roles of the overachieving student and the hardworking worker. Upon reflection, I understand that I couldn’t possibly have felt successful because I still hadn’t defined what success meant to me; I had only achieved what I felt was expected of me.
A month ago, I closed down my business, and I am currently living back at my parents’ home. I find myself feeling similar to that young girl in the armchair at her parents’ home 15 years prior—feeling the pressure to know the direction of my life while simultaneously feeling acutely aware of how my life doesn’t meet cultural expectations and definitions of success. In the moments when I am not conscious of this, I fall into thoughts of failure and despair. However, I catch myself, knowing that my perceived failure exists only in relation to our cultural expectations and definitions of success.
In a moment of sitting and staring into space, I fall back into the daydream I had 15 years prior, in which I was writing the magazine article about reimagining success. I smile at the memory because even my 20-year-old self questioned the idea of success that had been prescribed for her. I didn’t reimagine success back then, but I can now, and it feels more important than ever to do so.
The Power of a Word
Success is a deeply powerful word in Western capitalist culture because its meaning is embedded within some of its core values of individualism, achievement, and economic growth. Consequently, we unconsciously receive the message that our value and self-worth as people become contingent upon our level of success. We collectively have a hard time stepping back, pausing, relaxing, and being because our worthiness is unconsciously tied to our doing and achieving.
Given the high value our culture places on success, it inevitably becomes a marker of how we view ourselves and one another. We have been taught to view our success in comparison with one another. As a result, we can unconsciously compete against each other, trying to keep up because we don’t want to fall behind. If we aren’t careful, we can get caught in the trap of constantly trying to do more, obtain more, and achieve more in order to be more.
Don’t get me wrong: I am like any other person and have longings in the form of goals, big dreams, and desires that I want to achieve. I want to succeed in going after them! However, it is only after repeatedly and devastatingly failing to achieve our culture’s definition of success and questioning my value and worth in innumerable ways have I finally begun to take the time to question our culture’s definition of success and ask myself, What does it really mean to me?
Success as a Soul Journey
A few years ago, I remember hearing a spiritual teacher say that our deepest longings are invitations from our souls, guiding us towards our destiny. After hearing this, I came to think of our goals, dreams, and hearts’ true desires as our souls’ way of providing us with trail markers, guiding us on our own unique pilgrimages and leading us home to our truest selves. The achievement of these longings isn’t the sole goal—or the soul’s goal, you could say! Rather, these longings provide our egos with the motivation they need to go on a journey towards wholeness. During this journey, we are called to face our fears, overcome limiting beliefs, and simply learn. The journey becomes a process of soul recovery in which we begin reclaiming the wounded, forgotten, and abandoned parts of ourselves. From this perspective, the soul views success not solely as a destination but as the journey itself. For it is because of the journey that we go on that we learn and grow.
Remembering Ourselves as Nature
Words hold deep meaning and have the power to shape our reality.
In English, we use the word “nature” to describe the natural world outside ourselves. This has created a distinct separation between us and the natural world. For the Haida people, there was never a word for “nature” until contact because they never saw themselves as above or separate from it. In both cases, the word “nature,” or the lack thereof, holds the power to define our relationship with life and therefore influences how we interact with it.
If we see ourselves as separate from nature, we can easily believe that success is a process of onward and upward achievement and growth as shown to us by our larger culture. If we keep striving for this version of success, we will push all of nature toward extinction, including ourselves. However, if we begin to remember that we are a part of nature, we remember that life is non-linear and cyclical. It is full of seasons of life and decay. In fact, it is during the seasons of decay that compost is created—the rich soil needed for new and healthy life grows. Therefore, our failures are not the opposite of success; rather, they become the ground from which we grow forth.
Through starting up and running Conversations with Forest, I have faced fears and overcome limiting beliefs. In closing down Conversations with Forest, I have learned lessons in humility, self-compassion, forgiveness, and resilience. Both the rise and fall, my own cycles of growth and decay are integral to my own soul-recovery journey. When I begin to look at life through this lens, and remember that I am part of nature, I begin to see how success is truly about the winding and spiralling journey that is constantly bringing us closer to who we truly are.
With love,
Laurel