SUCKCESS

Our own concept of success ebbs and flows as our goals change and the goalposts move,

luck shows itself, misfortune and chance lay their cards.

Our defnition of success changes as we grow and evolve, and as our environment changes. Success is an obsession and the world is full of books about how to be successful and seminars on how we can be the best we can - that is how to be successful relative to others in terms of wealth or power or status.

We are urged to 'awaken the giant within', 'win friends and influence people', or share in the '7 secrets of the wealthy'.

We get hysterically excited at even the thought of success,

we pump ourselves up with positive affirmations,

we get employee of the month,

we seek victories, even tiny ones, anything will do

we stock up with achievements until our CV's reach that magic third page of puffed up triumphs.

Why?

We all begin with grand ambition and then this ambition seems liquid and transparent as it approaches fruition until what we thought was the success that would change everything becomes less concrete and more abstract and evaporates into the vapour of the next ambition.

And on and on it goes ... and it can never end ... until you know what ...

Eventually, where once we wanted to rule the world and captain our country, we end up wishing for nothing more than a peaceful life with a hint of meaning ...

an apparently gentler ambition ..

but even that seems elusive, no matter the trophies on the glass fronted cabinet, the certificates, the children long gone, the photographs to prove it all happened.

Where have we been? What have been doing?

For every winner, for all the trophies, there are a hundred losers - so even the victory is a hollow one - for what kind of person would celebrate success in the rational knowledge of the misery of a hundred other losers?

Success is a sickness

Scared to Death ?

I have spent many years in fear of death, and there have been other times when I might have welcomed it, like during reruns of Diagnosis Murder. The fear of death is the price we pay to have chanced upon life and there is a certain amount of scrabbling about in the dirt of life trying to find the elixir that will make us immortal in some sense. We hold onto myths, archetypes, beliefs and ideas about death to ease our journey through life. Though none of these ideas can prevent our own deaths or ease the pain of loss and the trials of grieving that the death of a loved one will inevitably provoke. But mystical and irrational ideas about death do soothe the sore, along with distraction and a new woollen coat.

Nobody who has ever lived can claim to know any secrets that may surround death, if indeed there are any, which there probably aren't. Equally no authority can say with certainty that death is the end. The knowledge then is that we cannot know of this mysterious realm that relates so closely to our life that it affects and infects all we do. We are, each of us seperately or in groups, entitled to believe anything we wish, in order to get through this life. Getting through this life is all this life demands of us, even if our parents wished we were doctors.

GUESTHOUSE

A boy is painting the guesthouse with me after reading The Anatomy of Melancholy

Nobody has ever read from cover to cover that great tome: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up by Robert Burton

... mainly because it was written in olde englishe in 1621 and is around 1600 pages long ...

This scholarly investigation, the largest ever undertaken of its kind, investigates the curse and the causes of medieval melancholy ... or what we now call depression, low mood, sadness, nostalgia, anxiety, self-pity, indolence, misery, stress and despair - or what I call Tuesday.

But give the Mr Burton credit - after spending over ten years in writing and research he does actually come up with a practical cure for the condition in six words ...

... Be Not Solitary, Be Not Idle