“One may go a long way after one is tired.” ~French Proverb
My measures of success are changing as I am more deeply anchored to positivity. On some days, just the bold and courageous act of showing up again is enough. You can’t quite see how it will all work, but you have enough faith in yourself and the world to wait it out. Even as you make the attempts to solve problems that won’t budge or open pathways to new possibilities that remain out of reach, you stay immersed in your ineffectiveness and call it good.
There is a dishonest travel company that recently sold me a room for the Expo West. I still can’t tell if it is a long chain of unintentional mistakes or a scam but the longer I wait on a refund, the more I feel a victim of a scam. Each day, I have to fight getting caught up in my indignant anger. It is like a storm ever at the ready to swallow me up. Dealing with dishonesty and disrespect in the course of your days and not dropping into the drama and emotional turmoil it generates has been a challenge. I watch myself gravitate toward the issue in the moments when I am already feeling low. Most of the dramas we create are feeding the frustrations already inside of us.
It is easy to get lost in the spiraling tales of human drama. There is a stickiness factor to indignation, anger and even hatred. They are feelings that can consume so much time and energy because it is easier to live in the justification and rage than face to pain and humiliation that comes from giving up to the losses. I know people who have dedicated their life to this pursuit. It is not a happy ending.
Real success can be measured by our ability to let go of the stories that lead us to a dead end in ourselves. Coming back to some deeper truth about how we are all in this together and being able to see the predicament as a shared human experience are the measures of real success. Even if I only get a glimpse of this, the stickiness of the anger loses its grip.
Some days just remembering why I spend my hours trying to make a love company work and grow in the world is all I can do. It is enough to find a single reason to keep up this business for love. I can call it success as I fall off to sleep.
