MY SUCCESS, YOUR SUCCESS
I’ll be archiving the entries for the first quarter of the year now that the 31st has arrived. This will be the last posting for the first quarter and tomorrow things begin anew.
Nice to divide the year into quarters and months and weeks and days. It gives us all a chance to start over or start fresh- with our families, with our friends, with our work, with our chores, with our dreams, our hopes, our lives. Kind of a nice deal.
It’s still early and in a little while I will be getting the kids up to get them ready to go off to school after a ten day break for Spring. We didn’t do anything very unique or too exciting from a kid’s point of view but we did spend a good bit of family time together. I know they are not thrilled about going back, though they do like school, but I know that I will appreciate some of the available time it offers me. Still I will miss the moments we shared.
They start their day off in band. After that they will go to their classes. Later today they will go to the allergist and then practice baseball in preparation for their first game tomorrow. Opening Day!
Lots going on. Lots more to come by the grace of God.
What will they do with their lives? What will interest them? What do they love now that they will no longer love next year and what new things will draw them in?
When I was a kid I didn’t know much, not nearly as much as I think my kids do at the same age. Not sure why that is but it is.
When I was a kid I wasn’t aware of all of the opportunities and things to do that are out there in life, even at a young age. No one really ever told me and I certainly did not know. My kids are aware of as much of this as I was around the time I entered college. Maybe more.
When I was a kid we did not have the resources to pursue much of anything if it cost money. So we did what we could with the little we had. The situation is much different for my kids. I think that’s good, that’s better, but sometimes I do wonder.
If my kids have all of this knowledge, an early start, and the resources to pursue the opportunities that interest them and the stuff that makes up their dreams then I would think, I would hope, that success for them is farther reaching and is achieved much sooner and much more fully than it ever was for me.
But then there is the burnout factor and the very real chance that they will pursue something that they think they like before they are mentally or physically mature enough and they will then discard it for something else that is a bit simpler, a bit easier to be good at. The impulse purchase syndrome.
There is also the achievement factor in that some things too easily achieved do not hold the same deep feeling of accomplishment as do the things that take so much more effort, of you, to achieve. The level of satisfaction of a challenging goal achieved is just not the same and the level of excitement is just not as high. So I guess that the impetus to just walk away can come more easily, especially for a kid.
What exactly is success and what price should be paid to reach it? Is it fair that some seem to reach it so much sooner and more easily than others? Is it fair that some never seem to get there or, worse perhaps, never seem to feel that they ever arrive no matter what they pursue, no matter how hard they might try?
I guess I don’t really know the answer. I guess I never did.
I don’t know if I was ever really successful until I began to try to help my own children in their pursuit of success. But for them it is not seen as success. It is seen as doing something they enjoy and because they enjoy it then doing it more and maybe doing it better.
And when they have finally succeeded I suspect they may not know it either. I will and I might then also consider it a success for me but I likely won’t. Or maybe I will.
Success then, I guess, is merely only our own accomplishments as viewed and judged by others and is, therefore, in the end, really out of our hands.
All that we can do is to do what we like or love or want to do. And then maybe doing it better.
In a free world and especially in this country this is possible and I would dread to live in a world, in a country, where it is not.