Reimagining Success
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, the expectation was 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 brought myself 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 and attractive junior planner. 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 found myself living back at my parents’ home. I found 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 didn’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 fell back into the daydream I had had 15 years prior, in which I was writing the magazine article Reimagining Success. I smile at the memory because even my early 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
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 many Indigenous peoples, like the Haida, 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 a culture’s relationship with life and therefore influences how we interact with it.
Success is a deeply powerful word in Western capitalist culture because its meaning is embedded within some of the culture’s 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 with one another and try to keep going at all costs because we don’t want to fall behind. However, given that our culture promotes endless growth, success doesn’t have a ceiling or an endpoint. Because there is no fixed marker for success, we can find ourselves constantly feeling like we never fully “achieve it.” And if we aren’t careful, we can get caught in the trap of constantly trying to do 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, 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 on a journey toward wholeness. After hearing this, I have come to think of our goals, dreams, and true hearts’ desires as our souls’ way of providing us with trail markers, guiding us on our own unique pilgrimages and leading us home to our true selves. The achievement of these longings isn’t the sole goal—or the soul’s goal, you could say (hehe). Rather, they provide our egos with the motivation they need to go on a journey to face certain fears, overcome limiting beliefs, and learn lessons that arise as we work toward our longings. The journey becomes a process of soul retrieval, calling on us to reclaim wounded, forgotten, or abandoned parts of ourselves. From this perspective, success becomes about the journey. It is through the journey that we go on that brings us back into wholeness.
Remembering Ourselves as Nature
Success is a deeply powerful word, and how we see it has the power to shift our reality.
We have been taught one definition of success that is based on Western capitalist culture’s values and beliefs in limitless and endless growth. If we keep striving for this version of success, we will push all of nature toward extinction—ourselves included. Reimagining success involves remembering our relationship with nature. When we begin to remember ourselves as part of nature and not separate from it, we remember that the pilgrimage of life is full of cycles of life, death, and rebirth. These cycles of death are not failures; they are inherently part of the journey.
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 of this venture were integral to my own soul-retrieval journey. When I begin to look at success through this lens, I see that success truly is all about the winding and spiralling journey that will bring us home to who we truly are.
Invitation:
Take a moment to look at your most recent “failure” and write down three to five things that you learned from the experience. It can be a way you handled a situation with your child that you aren’t proud of, a meaningful post you shared that went unnoticed, a project or dream that didn’t go as planned, or any other experience that didn’t turn out quite as you had hoped.
After you write down what you learned, see if you can begin to notice how these “failures” are all integral to becoming who you are meant to be.