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Success

10/6/2014

1 Comment

 
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"Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care."  Alain de Botton




Many people equate success with the ability to have what they want, when they want it. It is "the pursuit of happiness", or by another term, "The American Dream".  However, the "the pursuit of happiness" and the struggle to discern the difference between wants and needs creates anxiety.

The antidote for that anxiety is helping others succeed when success can be defined by helping others meet their needs. Because we struggle with knowing the difference between what we want and what we need, love, then, is to be available to the struggle of another's 'pursuit of happiness" - to enter into the ambiguity if not-knowing.

The difference, then, between needs and wants is no longer as relevant, anxiety is released, and our capacity to 'love without measure' increases.
1 Comment
Melissa
10/7/2014 02:21:59 pm

I like how this post raises questions and makes me think.
Yes, loving without measure is embodied in not shirking ambiguity. It is embodied in being available to another’s struggle to distinguish between wants and needs.
But that stance of availability is not an escape from my own struggle to distinguish, and neither is it an equation of wants and needs, in my own life or in the lives of all I seek to love without measure.

Frederick Buechner, in Telling Secrets, writes

Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you . . . remember that the lives of others are not your business. They are their business. They are God’s business . . . even your own life is not your business. It also is God’s business.

It’s true that anxieties keep us from loving, and perfect love casts out fear, but even in our anxieties we can step forward in love, acknowledging the struggles and fear. It seems like struggle is a part of living, and being together in solidarity in struggle is a way to love.

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