Do you remember ever sitting in the back seat of the car as a kid, gazing out the window at the car next to you, and suddenly having a panicked sense that you were moving backwards? It’s funny how just seeing that car pass you is enough to create such an illusion.
Life can feel like that too sometimes. I’ve begun to imagine life as many interconnected roads and each of us as a car driving on those roads. Like cars on the highway, each driving at a different speed to a different destination, we are all on our own journey – there is no single definition of success. And yet, we often fall victim to the illusion that the people driving by reflects on us, as if it means that we’re moving backwards or that we aren’t successful.
I think there’s a misconception, one that I’m struggling to let go of myself, that success means getting to a place in life where you no longer need to worry or put in effort to move yourself forward. There’s a temptation to look at the people in the cars ahead of us, and tell ourselves that those people have already made it. They’re so far ahead, they can just cruise or stop driving all together. “They’ve arrived”. But life is not that simple.
First of all, there are people out there that got a head start living mere miles from where they’re going, and there are people out there being held back facing unpaved roads and horrible driving conditions. I’d be remiss not to mention that not only are we are going to different places, we all also start in different places and have very different experiences. Still, I do want to try to focus on our individual experiences now, not comparing ourselves to others.
Life is a series of moments, and all we have is this moment, right now – there are the emotions and lessons we carry with us from the past, and there are the emotions and anticipation that we carry with us for the future. There is a simple definition of success, the accomplishment of an aim or purpose. But, when it comes to the wider context of leading a successful life, I have found no simple understanding of what this means.
If success is the accomplishment of a goal, then how do we measure the many difficult moments leading up to that accomplishment? The moments where we may feel as though we’re moving backwards or moving in the wrong direction or simply not moving at all. (Is it just the mathematician in me, or would it not be the most amazing thing to find a formula that could find a balance between all of these moments, and determine objectively, how successful we are?)
In the end, we each get to decide what success means to us. We all decide what goals to set for ourselves, what we want to work for. The metrics set by those around us do not necessarily dictate what success looks like for us. Remember, one car that exits to another free at an interchange, is no more or less “successful” than the one that stays straight in the fast lane. Life is full of back roads and intersections and highways, but each of us are on our way to different places.
This is part of what makes life so subjective. There are people behind you, looking at you ahead of them, with an entirely different perspective of where you are. We’re all in our own cars, following our own paths at our own speeds. Comparing our journeys to others’ can help to motivate us to keep moving, it can show us the rich possibilities ahead of us, but don’t let yourself be fooled into thinking that you’re not moving fast enough or that you’re moving backwards just because someone else might be moving faster than you.
As someone who is still trying to figure out what I want, who I am and where I’m going, I think that living a successful life is about generating momentum that will carry us forward to the many moments to come. I know that for every moment of achieving a goal, there are so many moments of hard work and struggle. I also know that every person, and every moment, needs something different to create that momentum.
Just keep moving, and as my dad would say “you’re not lost, you’re right here.”