Janathan Grace Reflections   This is my journey of self discovery shared with you

My sister Mardi is a visual artist in multiple media as well as a poet.  I love her work.  And she thinks deeply like I do.  This is the first part of a letter she sent to me while I was struggling with my own sense of failure in India.

What is success, really? And why do we value it? Does it have any actual value in itself? It can have many meanings for many different people, it could have to do with how much money a person or project earns, how much recognition it receives, how many people it influences.  In simpler terms, for those of us who have a vision, a dream, a goal we are trying to achieve, success could mean simply achieving that.  But in our economically driven society there is another aspect of it: that we would like our dream to support itself (at least) and also support us (if that’s possible).

We have the dream, we plan a strategy for reaching it and we begin investing our life in it’s accomplishment.  We give our time, our thought, our energy, our money.  And the dream grows and expands and becomes more complex and elaborate.  But how do we measure the success? By the first criteria – achieving the dream, or by the second – supporting itself and us?  What if we can be successful with the first and not the second?  What if, for all our efforts we can be successful with neither?

My life has been an experience in non-success.  I am intimately familiar with all the various ways to be unsuccessful in all its nuances.  So I have learned a number of ways of dealing with this without giving up the dream. And I have developed a philosophy about the nature and purpose of success itself.

When we are trying to achieve our dream one of the first things we can do is recognize when it seems that the original plan is not working. We try to re-evaluate the situation.  Adjust our goals. Modify our expectations to something that seems perhaps more achievable given our resources and limitations.

Mardi Woodblock Print: Seagull

In my life, after years of trying to sell my work, promote my work, create work that would be popular, I realized I was not going to get a large response to my work.  But there were people who loved it and always responded enthusiastically to anything I created.  They were few enough and poor enough that they couldn’t have supported me for a week if they all got together!  But the spiritual support and encouragement they gave me was invaluable.  So I began to create just for this limited audience, with hopes that eventually my work would achieve a wider success.  Since these people couldn’t afford to buy work, I give it away as Christmas gifts.  Occasionally some one who has contacts loves my work and I have a brief experience of selling.  But even in very good years I’ve never made $1000 and when you take out the expenses for materials I’ve always lost money. Some years, with great effort, I just lost less.  By any standard you’d like to use I am unsuccessful.

I began thinking in recent years about the whole nature of success.  Some people think that success is the result of hard work, skills in some area or a combination of the two.  But I knew many people who worked very hard and could never reach that place where they could be considered successful.  I also knew people with great talent, skill and ability, people with magnificent vision and insight.  Yet they were completely unsuccessful.  At the same time there were those who were neither hard working, skilled, nor wise who were achieving success in numerous ways: receiving recognition and honors, making money, achieving the goals they set for themselves, doing the things they loved, enjoying the things they did.

In my own life I was exhibiting in local and regional art exhibits with hundreds of other artists.  But because I was in the category of printmaking I was actually competing against only 2 or three other people usually.  The odds for me winning awards should have been very good.  Yet year after year I never won any awards, even when I created very complex, very large works. I felt my work was much better than many of the pieces that won – but then what artist doesn’t feel that!?

What struck me however was that it was repeated year after year with all sorts of different judges and different shows, and different other artists.  The sheer volume of the rejection was becoming compelling.  It seemed that the ones who won the awards were also people who seemed to be successful in many other areas of their life as well, financially, career achievements and all that.

So I began to think that perhaps success was not something that we achieved at all, either by effort or by skill or by insight.  What if success is simply something that has been given to us, one of the criteria of our life, like our family, our intelligence, our size, etc.  What if it is not an end or a goal at all but merely one of the many things through which we can learn those things that have Real value?

I began to think of life as a school in which each person who is born is given a unique curriculum especially designed just for them.  It includes many gifts that will give pleasure and gifts that will give pain.  There will be things to strengthen and things to challenge.  There will be things that seem to help and things that seem to block us.  But the purpose of everything is not to become or to achieve or to acquire any of the things we end up using our lives to become, achieve and acquire.  They are all given to us in order to teach us something more, greater, something of Real value.

Mardi Woodblock Print: Butterfly