success is

You can choose to color outside the lines. You can be free, backpack through Europe and find yourself dancing the Malo Kolo under a twinkling Croatian sky. You can quit your well-paying and stable job to launch a smoked salmon business, be a filmmaker, makeup artist or extreme kite flyer. It doesn’t matter which path you choose, society tells us. What matters is that if you eschew the conventional to live your longings, you better do so with gusto and become a smashing, undisputable success.  

You make good money. You vacation in Europe. You find time for daily reflection and meditation. You’re happy. You’re fit. Etc. Etc.

We’re shown this trope over and over.

I hold no animosity towards others’ success. These are incredibly fascinating stories. Inspiring though? I’m not so sure. We don’t hear about those who risked big and lost. Those who don’t win the lottery but are doing just fine. Few are the stories of those with minimal acclaim showing up day in and day out for their thing, weathering the uncertainty only by some inconsistent-at-best trust that they’re right where they need to be.    

There’s nothing wrong with striving for “success.” But for those taking the road less traveled, how much of that striving comes from trying to “prove” our life choices? Until we check that phantom box of ‘I’ve made it,’ it’s struggling, doubt and fear the whole way. Maybe we’ve done it all wrong? Maybe we’re stuck? Was there was some opportunity we missed? Should we just jump ship?  

No.

We can find the peace we seek when we see there is no there there. When we reach that pinnacle of achievement, when the accolades flood, the applause roars and the dollars pile, the whispers of doubt and fear do not cease. There is story after story after story of this. So, what then? We learn to be with these inconvenient feelings. We feel our sensitivity, entertain that we’re a failure, let our over-active mind tumble us toward every worst-case scenario, and then we breathe.

We pause from going into hyper-active doing mode to push these “inevitabilities” away, and instead we come to the body. We feel the ache in the chest, the heaviness in the throat, the churning in our stomach. We come to our softness, our vulnerability, our tenderness. We feel the pulse of our aliveness. In this space, the light is a little different. We see the hummingbirds. We lay on the floor and let ourselves be heavy. We surge with adrenaline and feel its effervescence.

Coming into close proximity with our humanness opens us to the world, the prickliness of it, the rawness of it, the wonder of it. This is what happens when we’re not living on autopilot. We can learn to be with this. To trust it. Finding ourselves when we feel like we’re coming up short against some outside arbiter of success? Well, that feels like success to me.