Internal Mono(b)log

Looking at an event, a person can either be said to have succeeded or failed in achieving a goal. Looking at a lifetime, how does one judge? Ask yourself “I’m a success? Am I a failure?” I postulate that only YOU can answer that question.

I was thinking the other day about how people think of others and themselves as either (generically) a success or a failure. This is what I came up with.

The label of successful or failure is one that is applied by society or by our buying-in to society’s expectations of what we *should* be doing with our lives. So, for example, a person is typically thought of as being successful if they have a high-paying job, a big house, a nice car, nice stuff, money to go on vacations and spoil those around them. Conversely society will assign a label of failure on a person, if they haven’t “lived up to their potential”. This is, of course, all subjective from the perspective of the observer.

I realized in my pondering that the adjective “Successful” or “Failure” applied to one’s life is not particularily useful. Trying to apply these terms to yourself is always dependent on your frame-of-mind. If you’re in a positive mood, you’ll label yourself a success. If you’re down, you’ll call yourself a failure. These terms are really indiscriptive and both are harmful. Failure implies a negative end-state, success a positive end-state. Both imply and end-state. Not particularily useful if you’re still alive.

I came to the idea that while you’re alive and looking at your life in order to make corrections, the 2 drivers for your life should be the following : *contentment* and *fulfillment*. Unfortunately, these 2 terms are a little difficult to define wholistically in the way I intend.

Contentment… being happy and comfortable in your surroundings. Having food to eat, heat, clothes, etc… Of course, contentment can be lost through external influences and human nature. Things like greed or jealousy work against your contentment by confusing you into thinking that your contentment is dependent on others. Contentment, in many ways, speaks to an internal state.

Fulfillment… living your life in a way that touches others or makes us feel that our life has value beyond our own basic survival and comfort. Fulfillment, in many ways, speaks to accomplishment or actions that our external to ourselves.

A life that strives to be both content and fulfilled and also balanced, is one that I believe to be inwardly “successful”. Society, well, they can make their own call based on whatever expectations they want to place. But someone who is inwardly “successful” won’t care what society thinks.

At times contentment and fulfillment will be at odds with each other. In some cases this is avoidable, but it take a great deal of soul-searching and personal honesty to find these solutions. If you find yourself in a situation where your contentment and fulfillment seem to be at the opposite ends of the same scale, then a radical change is required to align them. Take the factory worker as an example: completely bought into the “game” they have a comfortable living. They probably aren’t mentally or spiritually challenged (at least not by their work) and the majority of the factory-workers I know, I believe, would say that they haven’t had a very fulfilling life. When they challenge themselves and put aside the things that they believe are bringing contentment (cable tv, cell phones, etc.) in favour of finding a path that balances the contentment and fulfillment then they start to have the balance that at the end-of-days makes them feel that they’ve accomplished something with their existence.

When you’re lying on your deathbed, preparing to breathe your last breath, will your 5000 sq. ft. home, BMW, and Armani suits comfort you or will the knowledge of your fulfilling life and your current content state be what you carry into the next realm?

I believe that if we all lived our lives with these 2 barometers to guide us, that the world would be a better place. Seek contentment and fulfillment everyday and in every way. It is your responsibility to yourself to do so.

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I am still fleshing out this thought, input/discussion is welcome. I’ll probably edit this post or repost a more succinct outline when it has all taken shape in my [InternalMonoblog](http://www.internalmonoblog.com/)

[This](http://artlebedev.com/portfolio/optimus/) is one of the most amazing keyboards I’ve ever seen. Boy! Do I want one of these!!! Wonder if it works on Mac – it should!!!

I love [this](http://techdirt.com/articles/20051121/0310228_F.shtml). When I 1st got my digital camera and later my cell phone with a camera, and I was commuting 3 hrs/day, I saw and photographed some pretty incredible stuff. People fillingout paperwork while driving, people eating breakfast cereal with both hands while somehow holding the steeringwheel. It was pretty outrageous.

Of course, the fact that I was myself being a bad driver by focusing on taking pictures of bad drivers wasn’t lost on me.

With thanks to techdirt.com.

I’m sure I’ve seen things like [this](http://zapatopi.net/themes/dactylfractalzoom.html). Don’t stare at it too long and not at all if you’ve ingested any psychedelics recently.

I’ve been chatting online to a friend of mine in BC who happens to be a very accomplished Contact Juggler. She’s originally from Toronto and is homesick and thinking of coming back for a visit. I’ve been chatting with her about putting together a weekend CJ workshop while she’s back. She seems interested, which is absolutely F*ing amazing because I’ve been trying to teach myself for almost a year and I’m not making a whole lotta progress.

For those of you who have never seen contact juggling, checkout some of the videos on www.contactjuggling.org or if you really want to be inspired, checkout this video.

The workshop will probably be Saturday and Sunday, 4 hrs each day, and somewhere between $50 and $80. Anyone interested?

I’m not a great fan of snow, honest! I’d much rather drive to snow than have to live in it for the winter; however, this snow heralds the coming of winter – our 1st winter in the city in our new house.

The last 5 winters we’ve spent in the “Great White North” where once the snow fell it remained until April. I’m looking forward to the more modulated winter climate of the Big Smoke. Sure, the snow will only be white for an hour or so after it falls (if that long), but typically a day or two after it falls, it’s gone, so I’ll take it.

With any luck, this year I’ll actually get out and enjoy some winter activities! Ron’s a ski’er, Matt’s a boarder, I ski and kind-of board, so hopefully between the 3 of us we manage to hit the hills at least a little this winter.

Typically I don’t enter into the “My OS is better than your OS battle”; however, today I came across something in OSX that just made me smile (something rare when using Windows – smiling that is).

The latest OSX incarnations introduced the “Dashboard” – a set of widgets that are typically offscreen, but that can be activated with a key press or mouse gesture. Today, while poking about the net, I discovered a WordPress dashboard widget that allows me to publish blog entries from my dashboard.

Yup, that’s it… not earthshattering, but like I said, it made me smile.

The house is progressing, slowly… the drywall is pretty much done, as is the painting. The wiring on the main floor is complete and 50% of the wiring on the 2nd floor is done too. The unfortunate reality is that the remaining 50%, that which controls ceiling lights and the back 1/3 of the 2nd floor, requires me to cut an access hole into the attic and crawl around on the ceiling joists to run the wires.

Crawling around in a dirty, unexposed attic just doesn’t sound like a whole lotta fun to me. I know it has to get done, but yet I seem to be able to find a zillion other things to do around the house that help me delay the inevitable. When I’m not doing one of those zillion other things it’s easy to hide from the work entirely by going out shopping, eating, dog walking or veggin to music or television.

The return to full-time employment is looming and yet I still am having a hard time motivating myself to finish around the house. I know, I know… it has to get done, but it’d be so nice if it’d just do itself 🙂

Ok… motivation! Here we go… after a cup o’ coffee.. and maybe some lunch… and…

I seem to be odd… Smart-assed comments aside… I just returned from drinking a double-long-espresso and I’m falling asleep.

Caffeine just doesn’t seem to affect me the way it should. I think for me it’s psychological: coffee in the morning wakes me up, at night it puts me to sleep.

Probably a dose/tolerance thing, but strange none-the-less… I mean, how many people do you know that’ll fall asleep while in a cafe drinking their 3rd or 4th large coffee. 🙂

There is some strange connection for me between getting a new house and spending *way* to much time in a hospital.

When Kim and I moved into the place in Uxbridge we weren’t there a month before I was in hospital for a week getting my gallbladder removed in emergency surgery.

Similarily, but much less dramatic, I am now cooling my heels in St. Michael’s emergency after driving an old nail into the ball of my foot. _sheesh_ The tetanus shot is done and I’ve seen the doc, but now I’m waiting to get to xray to make sure there’s no foreign matter still in my foot. I then get to wait to see the doc again to get a scrip for some antibiotics.

One nice plus is that I can also get a scrip for a new epipen.

Someone needs to figure out how to speed this process up! One major factor that influenced my hesitance to come to emerge was that I knew I’d be here *way* to long. I was right… 4 hours and still going…