The first thing which comes to my mind when I think about life is a very famous quote by world-famous writer- “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players. They have their exits and entrances.” – William Shakespeare
Since my childhood, I have always heard lectures about working hard and being successful. There is a never-ending race in everyone’s life for being successful. For someone getting money would be a success, for some grabbing power would be a success or someone longs for a specific profession. Not only it is defined by career path, but also people relate it to relationships. For example successful son, successful daughter, successful husband, successful marriage etc.
If we talk about time frame than during the early civilization, success was being alive. With time when the human’s lives become little stable than eating good food and living simple lifestyle was a success. During the world wars, defeating the enemy was a success. Sometimes a revolution in life seems success and sometimes mere stable life in the war-torn area is a success.
The biggest question which today I want to raise is, whose definition of success is better and who got the right to decide which path will lead to success?
One of the biggest reasons for people being dissatisfied in life and getting over stressed is this term “success”. The pressure from society has resulted in a fixed path in life which is considered to be the path of success. Any other deviation from it is seen as an immature act of destroying one’s life. Though this fixed path may defer from society to society, by fixing such a dynamic term is itself the biggest blunder.
People start chasing artificial goals in life in the name of success. They forget that in reality every second which we live is a success in itself. There cannot be one thing more important in life than other, but it’s a combination of different aspects of life which together makes our life a complete journey.
I have seen many people who have earned a lot in life but what they missed was different experiences in life. They took a fixed path and their entire life revolved around it. Though they must be successful in their world, for me, they have missed so much in life which they would never be able to get again.
It’s fair to fail sometimes in life, sometimes to take a break, sometimes not to know what you want from life or sometimes to explore things just for the sake of an experience. For me, life is more a kind of expedition and not a race. There would be no winner or loser at the end. The only thing which would matter will be how happy and satisfied you were on this entire journey, how much new experiences you had, how many people you loved and how many lives you changed.
I know it’s tough for people to change their attitude towards life, to unlearn all those things which we have been taught by the society but at least we all could agree that every person is already successful in life. The only thing which they have to do is to “live” which unfortunately very few of us are doing at present.