-- Tehyi Hsieh
Meditation: a poem by Mary Oliver entitled “The Messenger”
My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium. The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth
and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all,
over and over, how it is that we live forever.
Reading: by Marian Wright Edelman from The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours (p. 39)
Lesson 3: Assign yourself. My Daddy used to ask us whether the teacher had given us any homework. If we said no, he’d say, “Well, assign yourself.” Don’t wait around for your boss or your co-worker or spouse to direct you to do what you are able to figure out and do for yourself. Don’t do just as little as you can to get by. If someone asks you to do A, and B and C obviously need to be done as well, do them without waiting to be asked or expecting a Nobel prize for doing what is needed. Too often today too many ordinary, thoughtful deeds are treated as extraordinary acts of valor… If you see a need, don’t ask, “Why doesn’t somebody do something?” Ask, “Why don’t I do something.” Don’t wait around to be told what to do. There is nothing more wearing than people who have to be asked or reminded to do things repeatedly. Hard work, initiative, persistence are still the nonmagic carpets to success.
Reading: by Laura Berman Fortgang from The Little Book on Meaning: Why We Crave It, How We Create It, this is from a chapter entitled “Success Happens” (p. 24)
A woman walks into her kitchen after a long day at work, to find chaos everywhere. Her teenagers are glued to the TV, pizza boxes and soda cans are strewn across the counters. “Has anyone started their homework?” she asks, knowing the answer in advance. She’s not one to talk, though. Her life is a mess. Bills are a week late – not because doesn’t have the money, but because she’s so busy managing she’s barely functioning. Climbing the corporate ladder has helped her fall a few rungs in her home life. Piles of dirty clothes lie in her bathroom. She hasn’t cooked a meal in weeks and she’s had to change her kids’ parent/teacher meetings twice. She could hire someone, but why pay someone when she can do it herself? Success happens…
All stories are different, but really, they are all the same. Getting what we want seems to come with a price. The more money we make, the more money we have to make. The better the job, the more the demands. And so on. We’re a tired bunch. We move like lightening to fulfill the obligations of our day. With our nose to the grindstone, jumping through all the hoops of modern life (neatly or not), making our way systematically through the benchmarks that are expected, we lose track of the richness that we hoped our efforts would achieve. The richness is there, but we are preoccupied. We’ve invented a man-made state called success, and we are so entrenched in managing it that we wear ourselves thin. We become blind to what we hoped it would create.
Reading: by the Indian sage Krishnamurti from a book of entitled Think on These Things
You see, we are so afraid to fail, to make mistakes, not only in examinations but in life. To make a mistake is considered terrible because we will be criticized for it, somebody will scold us. But, after all, why should you not make a mistake? Are not all the people in the world making mistakes? And would the world cease to be in this horrible mess if you were never to make a mistake? If you are afraid of making mistakes you will never learn. The older people are making mistakes all the time, but they don't want you to make mistakes, and thereby they smother your initiative. Why? Because they are afraid that by observing and questioning everything, by experimenting and making mistakes you may find out something for yourself and break away from the authority of your parents, of society, of tradition. That is why the ideal of success is held up for you to follow; and success, you will notice, is always in terms of respectability. Even the saint in his so-called spiritual achievements must become respectable, otherwise he has no recognition, no following.
Of Failure and Success
A Sermon Delivered on March 16, 2014
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
Have you done your homework? Did you get your grades for last week’s test? Isn’t there an exam you should be studying for?
At home, these are the questions that are perpetually on the tip of my tongue every time one of our two children enters the room, or passes by within earshot. If you ask them, they might say that the father-child exchanges at home have become somewhat repetitive, predictable, and annoying lately. But what they don’t know is that I have actually resisted nagging, and been able to bite my tongue ten times, for every single time the predictable questions escape my lips.
Noah is a sophomore in college, Sophia is a high school senior, and both are near that early stage in higher education, where doors for future pursuits will either be opened or closed to them, depending on their academic accomplishments right now.
Don’t waste hours surfing the internet, or hanging out with friends. “Assign yourself!” I want to shout all day. Work hard, show initiative, be persistent, that’s the path to success.
What I don’t tell them is that when I was their age I was not a highly motivated student myself. My grades reflected the fact that – at that stage of my life – academic achievement was not my highest priority.
Nevertheless, I was not oblivious to the fact that my older brother Derek breezed through high school with straight A’s. On the side, he learned shorthand stenography, and got so good at it, he taught evening classes to adults while we was still in high school. At the same time, he became such a skilled ten-finger typist, that he earned money on the side, helping out in my father’s office. Then my brother went to med school to be a doctor. This was the kind of accomplishment my father favored.
My brother was on the fast track to success, and I seemed to be at the brink of failure in the game of life my father envisioned. My father thought his four sons, should all be doctors and lawyers, wealthy and well-adjusted, happily married, and providing him a multitude of grandchildren – or so he said, half joking.
But this is not how things turned out. Toward the end of his medical training, my brother got involved with a spiritual group called the Ananda Marga. And rather than completing his dissertation and opening a practice in Germany, he moved to India, to practice yoga and become a celibate monk and teacher. He wore orange robes and a turban. And I was the one who went on to become happily married, and provide the obligatory grandchildren.
I remember, at the time, my brother’s vocational reassessment was a real challenge for my parents. In the years that followed, it was much more difficult to say who in the family was headed for success, and who was a failure.
* * *
What does it mean to be a failure? What does it mean to succeed in the game of life?
As Unitarian Universalists we draw from many sources to find answers to these questions. For instance, from the work of Milton… Bradley. A hundred and fifty years ago Milton Bradley invented a board game called “The Game of Life.”
The object of the game is very straightforward. Right here in the instructions, updated in 2000, it says: “Collect money and LIFE tiles (show LIFE tile)… Each LIFE tile carries a secret message: a special achievement, and a dollar amount that counts toward your total cash value at the end of the game.”
So, for instance, one LIFE tile says: “Build a Better Mousetrap - $50,000.” Others say: “Open Health Food Chain - $100,000.” “Write Great American Novel - $150,000.” “Win Nobel Peace Prize - $250,000.” (Gather LIFE tiles. The more the better.)
In the course of the game, you spin a wheel that tells you how far you can advance for each turn. Along the way, you choose a career and a salary, get married, have up to four children, buy a house, purchase insurance and pay taxes. The game ends when everyone has reached retirement. Then you tally up your LIFE tiles, and count your money. The player with the most money wins – and is a success.
* * *
In real life success is not quite so simple. This is what Laura Berman Fortgang has discovered. Trying too hard to succeed in one area of our lives can lead to failure in others. In real life career success and family failure often exist side by side. A preoccupation with material affluence, can lead to spiritual impoverishment. And – tragically – even if we achieve our most treasured life goals, after toiling year in and year out for the sake of the single accomplishment we thought would make us happy, we may find ourselves anything but.
Striving for “a man-made state called success” may seem like a sure path to wealth, health and happiness, but actually worldly success has several pitfalls. At least this is the way the religious scholar Huston Smith sees it.
Smith says a certain degree of success is needed in order to support a household and to discharge one’s civic duties. But beyond that, worldly success has some real limitations. First of all, because worldly success – fame and fortune – is always precarious. What can be gained can also be lost. Secondly, the drive for success is insatiable. Experience has shown that the more power and money people acquire, the more they want. Also, our achievements are ephemeral. Our worldly success dies with us. “You can’t take it with you,” they say. And finally, fame and fortune ultimately do not satisfy our deepest desires.
What are our deepest desires? To answer this question, Huston Smith looks to the teachings of Hinduism. Hinduism, he says, describes a Path of Desire, and several stages along the way. The first stage involves satisfying our desire for personal pleasure, the enjoyment of sensual delights. Hinduism doesn’t condemn hedonism. But rather realizes that sooner or later purely self-centered pleasures no longer satisfy us.
That’s when we often shift our attention to the goal of worldly success. But that, too, proves to be ultimately unsatisfying. The third stage along the path is that of service.
In the mind of Marian Wright Edelman, service is a crucial aspect of a more enlightened understanding of success. Apart from advising her children to assign themselves, she also asks them to use their political and economic power for the community and others less fortunate. She says, “Remember and help America remember that the fellowship of human beings is more important than the fellowship of race and class and gender in a democratic society.” And she says, “Never work just for money or for power. They won’t save your soul or build a decent family or help you sleep at night.”
According to Hindu teaching, it is when we realize that our own personal pleasures and accomplishments don’t fulfill our deepest desires, that we try to contribute to a greater good, something larger than ourselves, whether family, community, or nation. But ultimately, even this is not enough. Nevertheless all these stages of desire have some value. They should be understood and accepted, not rejected.
As Huston Smith puts it,
“Hindus locate… success on the Path of Desire. … Nothing is gained by repressing [our] desires… or pretending that we do not have them. As long as… success is what we think we want, we should seek [it]… Hinduism regards the objects of the Path of Desire as if they were toys. If we ask ourselves whether there is anything wrong with toys, our answer must be: On the contrary, the thought of children without them is sad. Even sadder, however, is the prospect of adults who fail to develop interests more significant than dolls and trains. By the same token, individuals whose development is not arrested will move through delighting in success… to the point where their attractions have been largely outgrown.” (The World’s Religions, p. 16, 17)
Beyond personal pleasure, worldly success, and devoted service, what humans truly desire is the experience of joy. We want the opposite of “frustration, futility, and boredom,” Huston Smith says. Because have the capacity to imagine infinity, we want infinite joy. We want infinite being, infinite awareness, and infinite joy.
And the kicker, Huston Smith says, is this:
“What people most want, that they can have. Infinite being, infinite awareness, and infinite bliss are within their reach... Not only are [they] within peoples’ reach, says Hinduism. People already possess them…
…The answer… lies in the depth at which the Eternal [- the Infinite -] is buried under the almost impenetrable mass of distractions, false assumptions, and self-regarding instincts that comprise our surface selves. A lamp can be covered with dust and dirt to the point of obscuring its light completely. The problem life poses for the human self is to cleanse the dross of its being to the point where its infinite center can shine forth in full display.” (p. 21, 22)
Pursuing the path of religious practice is how we learn to clear away the dust and dirt, and uncover the light that has existed within us all along, the light of love. Devoting our lives to this task, according to religious thought, is what it means to succeed.
* * *
Our fear of failure runs deep, Krishnamurti says. We are forever afraid of falling short of the expectations placed upon us. We are afraid of being judged as inadequate, as hopeless, as worthless.
And yet our so-called failures, our so-called mistakes may simply be steps we need to take in order to break away from the authority of our parents, of society, of tradition. As we chart our own path in life, we may need to fail in order to succeed.
I think Winston Churchill had this same idea in mind, when he said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” I like the way Thomas Edison put it. He said, “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
Success means fearlessly pursuing the path that is uniquely our own, even when others may fail to see the wisdom of our way. Krishnamurti says,
“Society has very carefully established a certain pattern according to which it pronounces you a success or a failure. But if you love to do something with all your being you are then not concerned with success and failure. No intelligent person is. But unfortunately there are very few intelligent people, and nobody tells you about all this.”
* * *
In recent years I have had a few opportunities to visit my brother Derek in India, where he is now running a small but very efficient health clinic not far from Calcutta. On a shoestring budget he has built it from the ground up. Apart from providing essential medical care and teaching yoga, he has lately been producing educational videos with local actors, to teach basic hygiene to nearby villagers. He is making a real difference in the lives of many people.
He isn’t married, doesn’t have children, and has very little money… but there is no doubt in my mind that he has assigned himself. There is no doubt in my mind that his hard work, initiative, and persistence have provided him with a sense of success – not only in the measurable fruits of his labors, but also in the satisfaction of knowing he has applied himself fully to his chosen life’s work, the work he loves.
And today, when I wonder which one of us is successful, and who is the failure… I conclude that we have both succeeded. Our paths are different, for sure. And we have each made our share of mistakes along the way, but we have each found what we love.
Do what you love with all your being. This is the lesson we are trying to learn. Don’t wait around to be told what to do. Find the work you are uniquely qualified to do, the work that touches you deeply and engages you fully, and do it.
Mary Oliver has found her work. Her work is to love the world. It is to keep her mind on what matters, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished. Which is mostly rejoicing. Which is mostly gratitude, to be given a mind and heart, and a mouth with which to give shouts of joy.
May we each find the path that leads us to our life’s work,
And may we have the courage to follow it.
Through good times and bad times, through failure and success,
May we forever strive toward a deeper love.
Amen.
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