Afraid of the Win.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed by human nature. Every nuance, every gesture, every slight pause and hesitation with a dropped tone and a stuttered intonation masking a specific choice of words that tells me what you really meant to say. I watch body language, micro-gestures, true reactions versus staged ones.
As you can guess, I’m a nightmare to be married to 🙂
But sometimes the biggest tell, the greatest cry echoing out of the broken mystery of the human soul, is the lack of something.
The reaction that should have been there, but never was, or the words that should have been shouted from the rooftops that were instead choked off in a moment of fear and frustration. What you do tells me what you feel safe doing, but what you don’t tells me what you are afraid of.
And some of us, me included, seem to be most afraid of the win.
I think it’s because we’ve tasted defeat before. Maybe you haven’t, at which point you have my admiration and (sadly) a small measure of jealousy. We all know what defeat can do, how it hurts and burns and gnaws at our soul.
We’ve been there, done that, got the t-shirt. You know in your soul that you can survive most of the defeats coming in your life.
But we’re afraid of what success can do to us.
For me, I’m worried about what parts of my soul, my insecurities and inadequacies, will raise their ugly heads when things start to go right in a really big way. I say ‘when’ because I believe the words we use define and direct the universe, so I’m careful of the words I write and speak.
I don’t believe that success changes you, I think it just allows those parts of you that you’ve kept controlled to break loose and find their way into the sunlight.
And some of those don’t look too pretty in the light of dawn.
So when things start to go right, I think we feel a little of that trepidation swirling around inside of our heads. I’ve written before that our light creates our shadow, and the brightest lights cut the darkest shadows in the room. If you’re in any aware of who you are, you’ve got a pretty good idea of what your shadows look like.
So you watch yourself, while watching everybody else.
But the funny thing about success, if you use it the right way, is that it also allows the better parts of your soul, the ones that give you hope and wonder, to shine forth as well.
For every negative side, there is always a positive that can be discovered, polished, lifted up and shared with the world in a tribute of generosity, kindness and love.
The choice of which side of our nature gets to rule is one we can make moment by moment.
It is rarely the content of our soul that defines us in the long run, rather it’s the choices that we made along the road of life that leave our mark on the lives that we touch.
So today, choose success, and choose kindness, and let both of them bring you joy.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings