FAILURE

I knew a man who, in the eyes of the world, was both accomplished and admirable. His first novel won a national prize, he went on to make money from other kinds of writing, and he took a principled political stand at a time it was dangerous to do so. He and his family paid a high price, but years later he was seen as a hero, his name well-known. But as glad as he was that he had done what he had done, something was missing. He regretted he had had no success with other novels and plays; he had wanted a career like Dreiser, or Dos Passos, any of the other great social issue novelists. It wasn't that he felt he was a failure, but he felt he had failed his deepest and dearest ambitions.
     I sometimes think that I could win an Oscar one day, the Nobel Peace Prize the next and gnash my teeth that it wasn't the Nobel for literature. Some part of me is a bottomless pit that is never filled no matter what I do. Freudians would say I have an out-of-whack superego, an ego driving me on which I can never satisfy. Many people do. For some, it drives them to greater and greater accomplishments, others are paralyzed by the impossibility of attaining an imaginary perfection of ambition, while others, like me and most other people, fall somewhere in the middle. On good days, I can take pleasure in my accomplishments but on a bad day I feel myself a complete and utter failure.
     Over the years, I've learned some things. I can step back from my self-centered opinions of myself, from both the grandiose and the self-loathing. I don't have to attach to either of them, or to any ideas in between. I remind myself of my belief that there is no truth, but only perspective, which is something I create, and it has a search light I can swing in another direction. It's very hard to believe that ideas I feel deeply, that seem to have no distance between them and whatever this thing is that I call "me", can possibly not be "real," not be true. But I've experienced many times that if I shift my gaze only a few degrees, move the light to a different part of the ocean, I can move out of all the judgments I make about myself. I know now that other direction, the stillness and release it provides, is always available to me, if I take a moment to look for it. 
     I often say, "Is, is." It's the shortest version I can think of for acceptance. I don't mean acceptance of any of my ideas, either the ones that drive me to outlandish pride and arrogance, the ones that tell me I have to resign myself, or the ones that collapse me into failure. I mean acceptance of the reality that all my opinions, no matter how vivid they can be, are only passing through, undoubtedly subject to change. 
     It's the paradox I want to have before me, that the only reality is that there is no reality, nothing fixed, unchanging, written in stone, or more true than anything else. That's where my freedom lies, in letting go, breathing in and out, surrendering to my own particular stream of consciousness.