Once Impossible, Now Possible
When measuring my successes and failures, I tend to be short-sighted.
I perceive where I am, and measure it against what I haven’t done or accomplished.
Success is always in the future, far away and blurry.
I am convinced that to feel fulfilled, one needs to cultivate the ability to notice and appreciate small, incremental changes. And paradoxically, to do this, it’s helpful to look take a long view of your life, and what you perceive as successes and failures.
To develop this long term view, I made a list of small and large that I can now do, that were once impossible:
Walk
Tie my shoes
Swim
Drive
Take a photograph
Memorize a poem
Draw
Paint a portrait
Write a play
Interview someone for the radio
Give a presentation
Teach a class to college students
Sing a song in public
Speak a second language
Keep a budget
Give a tarot reading
Travel to another country
Live in another country
Write a song
Love someone who didn’t love me back.
Forgive someone who hurt me.
Forgive myself.
Write poetry.
Perform a song in front of a live audience with a band
Write an album
Heal myself and others using energy.
Tell the truth, even if it disappoints someone I love.
This is only a partial list.
Many of the things on the list, I didn’t consider an accomplishment because I do them now as a matter of course.
Other things I didn’t realize were actual accomplishments until I wrote them down.
In the short term, what appears to be a failure, may be an early stage in the development of what later turns out to be a success. But you can only recognize this with a longer term perspective.
I often think about how Vincent Van Gogh only sold one painting while he was alive. He traded another painting to a doctor to pay for medical care. The doctor used the painting to patch hole in his barn roof (luckily, he patched it with the painting facing away from the elements).
Five years after his death, the art world changed, his paintings were discovered, and now, more than a hundred years after his death, we are still talking about his work. I wonder if he had had a longer term perspective on his work, if we would have been able to hold on long enough to enjoy his own success.
