What is success?

“What is success?” A friend asks me. I hesitate to answer because may be she is staring at my old out-of-fashion jeans Vs her business suit. But then I notice that she is earnest.
“Success is but a prison built for us by people who think they know us well. Success is the other people’s expectation of our lives. What they expect us to be. What we should be wearing, vehicles to drive, sort of wives/husbands to have and even when and where to get married.
These little worlds are what we come to believe as the true measure of success, of how successful we are. We buy them, we ingest them, digest and absorb them as our own. That is why we attach so much to ‘success and reputation’.
Tell me what is a reputation? Is it not what other people think you should be? Do we choose our reputations or are they manufactured for us?
“Unajua wewe ni mtoto wa Mzee wa Kanisa….”
“You know your uncle is a doctor…”
“You should be a teacher…it is better than a police…”
“Sasa usipo oa, watu watasema unashida gani?”
“At your age you should not weigh 80kgs….si uko na pesa ya gym?”
Your parents expect you to be more successful than your neighbour’s son. They keep reminding you. Because they paid your school fees, prepared you all their lives, so that they could live their dreams in you. Who will live your life for you then?
Your teacher wants you to take Physics…it is the future of humanity…the teacher emphasises… And so you jump into it with all the zeal of a cat dragging home a dead mouse.
How often have you heard people tell you the things that a ‘person in your position’ ought and should do?
They remind you time and again that at your age you should no longer be walking like livestock. You should be driving. Your uncle even ventures as far as to inform you that he had heard how cheap vehicles are in the city. You swallow hard.
At this point I remember that I spent my time in high school memorising the millimeters of rainfall in Brazil per annum. And the teacher was kind enough and patient to remind me that the soil type in Brazil is ‘Terra rosa’. Because you need these facts to be successful.
Let us go back to talking about success.
She replies:
“Come on Gee, success is our own creation?”
I almost agitated because she called me Gee…. But her earnesty makes me go on.
“This is my problem: we define success as what we make. Yet we are not meant to create success, we are supposed to be it.
Success is when you can hold the hands of your family members and say a prayer over that meal you have just cooked. Success is when your neighbour’s 5 year old son tells you: “When I grow up I want to be like you.” That is success. Anything beyond this is just like running after the wind (from a verse in The Good Book). Our lives become mechanical. Like Sisyphus who was cursed, forever pushing a rock uphill and then fetching it from downhill every time he had pushed it to the top.
It is this misguided pursuit of/for ‘success’ that makes us struggle and die struggling in the city, living in houses we can’t afford and buying vehicles to impress that classmate whom we hated back in school or may be that girl/boy who refused our advances. We sacrifice all our energies; blood, sweat and tears running after that ever shifting horizon. The minute you acquire this you move on to the next. We sacrifice everything. And we forget the most important thing: that there is a difference between ‘sacrificing for the family and ‘sacrificing the family’.
If you want to know just how Unsuccessful (with a capital UN-) you are, please, go through your FB friends’ photographs and promise me you will not feel depressed. Compare you life (in photos) and theirs. How depressed do you get? Please don’t tell us, we all know the last photo you were leaning on your landlord’s Toyota. Yea, and it is because it was parked ‘hapo nje’ so easy to convice us of your city-success.
The truth is, there is no new success in this world that you can achieve that has never been achieved. There is nothing like an ‘Original Success’. All you aspire to do has been
done out there in the world. The question lies in how much you can do within you.
Forget about landing on Pluto, let us turn the energies into ourselves. Build success from within and sure as Heaven it will ooze and exude into the world around us.

Posted from WordPress for Android