Success and Identity: which is which?

I was thinking, recently, about success, and it's relation to being human and existing. The past weeks have been a real "reality check", as the phrase goes, and I've actually learnt a lot about myself and humans in the process: we're kind of over-achievers. There is barely anything that a human being does that doesn't involve some sort of prize, reward, or benefit - I mean, it's not logical to just do something for the sake of doing it, with no guarantee of getting something out of it, is it? As a human being, that's just simply how I am. In order to survive, I try not to waste my time doing irrelevant tasks that don't have any foreseeable benefits; we all do. 

But really, if you think about it, how can we actually know whether something will benefit us or not? We can only see so far into the future, and after that, the void of possibilities stretches out like a long, tired yawn. Unfortunately, you don't realise that there is something other than "immediate success" until you've failed and had to face the mirror knowing that the face you see looking back at you is not a success, and that in actual fact, you have wasted your time. And you can't realise that you are more than just that one small failure until you've grown higher and bigger and stronger, and can look back on who you used to be and compare it with who you are now.

Disappointment is a killer. It can send you into depression, scar you with trust issues and betrayal issues for the rest of your life, and leave you leading a sour, solitary existence. But it can also grow you, and mould you into a better version of yourself. Basically, the only way to think of failure is as a step towards Version 2.0 and beyond of YOU. If you let the thoughts of uselessness and waste and general self-worthlessness take over your mind, they begin to control your every move, and suddenly life becomes just that: useless, a waste of time, and worthless. You don't want that, do you? 

Well I know I don't, I didn't. Every seeming failure can be turned into a success, if you just wait long enough. It might not be the success you had planned for yourself, or the success everyone else seemed to have planned for you. It might even be really really hard to actually see where the success is at all! But trust me, it's there. Sometimes the success is just getting up and moving on. Sometimes it's realising where you went wrong, and fixing it. Sometimes it's learning from your failure, as all the cliche phrases say, and learning to see "failure" in a different light. 

Success is learning to value yourself for who you are before evaluating yourself on what your successes are. If you have this mental image of you as a collage of all your successes in life (past, present, and future dreams,) you're going down the path to self destruction. Your successes can be annihilated in the blink of an eye. Yes, they have shaped you, but they have not made you. You were God's child before you had won anything, before you had become anything. And the moment you forget that the real you is gold and doesn't need any paper to make it pretty, you have failed yourself. You can't build a house if you haven't laid foundations - "the wise man built his house upon the rock" - remember that? 

Don't you want to be that cake that people will eat regardless of whether it has icing on it or not? Don't you want to be seen as you, before you are seen as a reputation or a certificate? Don't you want to be loved for you, not for your achievements? How can you expect people to see you, want you and love you, if they don't know who you really are? I'm not saying that success is bad - no, success is what drives you to look higher and bigger and wider, and become the best you, you can be. But I am saying that if success is all you want, you might reach the top, eventually, but who will be there with you, loving you even when you're not at the top anymore? The people who know the real you. 

Moral of the story: be yourself!

Am I those trophies?

Or am I his sister?

 

 Maybe I can be both?

Understand?

I understand.

I stand under the stars, 
watch aliens in a cartoon that are stars,
see cells in a brain that are brains -
and I understand.

But then, I stand under those same stars 
and see aliens
watch a baby grow, 
and see life
walk on the sand, 
(and realise that commas are not yet comatose)
and realise that where I stand is neither
where I stood a second ago, nor 
where I'll ever stand again.

Standing there;
a planet in a universe,
a universe of planets,
I sometimes think I understand.

But then I stand up,
or did I just stand down?
Put my hand up,
drop my hand down.
Reach for the stars,
or are they just straws?
(maybe they're imaginary alien's jaws)

I took a step, 
I took a stand,
But funny, somehow, I don't understand.

Do you understand?

The Philosophy of Exams

I overheard someone saying that exams were the worst thing ever invented, and although on the spur of the moment, my mind strongly agreed with her comment, in retrospect I’ve decided that they are not. There is a whole other world which opens up when one writes exams – a world of work, seriousness, stress and nerves, but also a world of excitement, opportunity and a future. It’s ironic that during the hardest periods of our lives we seem to find even more reasons to hope and believe, and a multitude of inspirational reasons for not giving up. But when life’s going fine and dandy, we tend to get bored and that is the moment when depression and indecision strike!

It is easier to choose the worst of three unappetising options than the best of three exciting ones. When faced with a choice between Bad 1 and Bad 2, I think the brain realises that either way something Bad is going to happen, and makes its decision efficiently and accordingly. Contrast Amazing 1 and Spectacular 2 and the brain goes into an excitable hyper-drive, making a frenzied choice that always leaves the decision-maker wondering if the other option would have been better. So when exams come around, it can be concluded that it is easy to decide to get on with exams (Bad 1) instead of failing exams (Bad 2), but once they finish it is painstakingly difficult to decide whether to have a manicure (Relaxing 1) or a pedicure (Happiness 2).

The time spent in total solitude, when studying, can be considered a time of introspection, a time to learn about oneself and to meditate, and one will often find that it is during the period of the build up to exams, and the time during exams, when one feels most philosophical and has more profound thoughts than usual. With all these deep musings flying around there is bound to be friction, because they will collide at some point, and these collisions can, I believe, be held responsible for the majority of the tensions and emotional outbursts that occur during the exam period. Imagine if every person was digging far deeper into themselves than they had ever done before, and possibly discovering things they didn’t necessarily want to – this would lead to a few minor personal complexes, mild schizophrenia and a touch of confused tension.

But none of this self-discovery and personal solipsism of the soul would happen if exams didn’t exist. To be fair, some people think deeply like that most of the time, and that’s why the world is as it is, but envisage every person studying for and writing even just one exam brooding about existence all day every day. It’s a kaleidoscopic thought!

Picture every person as a unique shade of a unique colour. Each of these people is surrounded by an aura of their colour that imprints itself on the atmosphere around it, in the air, in the wind, in the minds of the people around it; and this fog of colour darkens and becomes more opaque as the person gives off more thoughts, or thinks more deeply. So now each aura of each person is glowing darker and darker than it did before, and this means that whereas before all the aura fogs could exist in harmony, merging into one another and blending to perfection as they morphed under other auras’ influences, now they refuse to be confined and redefined, and they jab against each-other, their solidifying and condensing fogs unable to be changed by another different foreign fog. This is exam mode.

So you see, exams can be both good and bad: they can bring introspective tendencies to the shallow soul, deepening its waters, but they can also cause consternation and conflict as people realise that they are not who they think they are, and that other people might not be who they once believed the other people were.