A couple of people wrote me a note after reading Success to check if I was depressed. I was so happy that they checked up on me! I also assured them that I wasn’t, and I apologise if that post felt like it was particularly ‘down’. I was exploring my feelings on worldly success and it turns out that I don’t rate it much, although I often forget that and feel bad about it until I remember that you can’t win against something when you’re standing on its home turf – that is, if you don’t want to be in the Worldly Success grinder you don’t argue with it you step away from it.
When I wrote it in that free-form style it felt like I was engaged in quite a lively, ‘real’ (as in authentic) creative activity. That always makes me happy on one level, regardless of the subject. I also knew that I was treading old rope, as I think of it – walking over ground already covered, and recycling the ‘old rope’ that millions have thrown out before when contemplating the negativity that they perceive coming their way. I was interested and as I thought about what I was writing I felt that I understood clearly what was going on.
In short: it’s not you, it’s me. Isn’t it always? It’s not what happens, it’s what you make of it.
But my friends were right in one thing. I was looking at things in a negative light. The exact same things can be the material for a big surge of happy too – so let me now cast them in the opposite light:
How wonderful to find so many people doing their best to promote positive attitudes, no matter what the format they are using! That stuff is everywhere, you don’t have to look hard to find all kinds of people from every walk of life on the internet making notes and comparing stories in which they talk about how their experiences have enriched them and helped them to become better people. The exhortations popping up in threads and in comments are there in such numbers purely so that one of them will catch your eye and remind you that while you’re alive you’ve still got things you can do to help the world.
The best of these are the ones which recognise that all it takes for the world to be ‘saved’ is for you to save yourself and see things in the joyful light – not because you don’t know what suffering is and not because you don’t have compassion for everything alive which is in a terrible predicament of some kind – but because by being joyful you are one more conduit of positive power in the world. When you are in a state of joy everything you touch turns to Fab. This is why I don’t mind even when I look and judge my successes and note my rejections – nobody can take away my joy, I can go into it at any time IF I remember to do that because a lifetime of being Eeyore isn’t that easy a habit to bust.
Also, Eeyore wasn’t ever disappointed. Life met his expectations. So he had that. And he was the only person who was as happy with a burst balloon as a whole one.
I’m sorry if my Success post felt like a burst balloon. At the end the post said I was sad for people who were on the Exhortation Trail because they are always rushing forwards and never arriving. I felt they were on the trail to Tired and Crazy whereas I have my life and time in which to exist without stress – people, I have already got everything a being could possibly want. If I’m doing miserable that’s just the tourist version. I have been miserable. I do go there sometimes to check it out. But deep down underneath all the various layers of self I was one of the lucky few in this existence and I am not happy, I am joyful.
Note though that I am not the world’s greatest motivational writer and I do get stuck in my head’s various eddies.
Mystic Moment: with this in mind I went over to Inspirobot and cranked the handle of fortune. Machines love me. I always know when they’re going to come up with something good. It created the following saying for me, “When you have nothing left to say, inspire someone.”
See – the universe DOES hit you over the head with a bat and everything is in tune.