Success - An Introspection

Looking at myself is difficult but I will do it. Everything is looming large at the moment. It is as if I have shrunk and/ or the world around me has grown. A bit like Alice. Was Carroll also hinting at this aspect of the self when he wrote Alice? Or, Defoe when he wrote Gulliver’s Travels?

My life seems to have fallen into a serious mess. I could say, ‘things have fallen apart’. This leads to an interesting insight into the importance of “success”. It is only when one fails (or is a failure) that one’s failings are exposed. If one succeeds then, notwithstanding the existence of the very same failings, no one pays any attention to them. This is probably the main reason for coining the saying “nothing succeeds like success”.

Success is like the light of the sun. It blinds, it dazzles, it conceals more than it reveals, it cloaks the reality of the universe that we live in (the universe within). Failure on the other hand, like darkness at night (or, even, the light of the moon), reveals all. The truth of our existence cannot be escaped in the cold light of the stars.

Success is power. Power allows people to ride their faults. The absence of it turns the same faults into to millstones round their necks. The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner is about power and the loss of it. About actions that seem justified when carried out (whether out of a sense of arrogance or out of ignorance) and, the agonies that we undergo thereafter. It is about the foolish arrogance that scorns its lodestar, destroying the very thing that guides and sustains it.