What is Success?

I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to succeed in life, to feel accomplished. Because I am pretty hard on myself & often listen to the voice that tells me that I cannot succeed, ever. So what does this even mean, to succeed?

After some contemplation I have decided that success to me is moving through each day with purpose. No matter what it is that we are supposed to do with our lives if we don’t feel we have purpose & if we don’t plan with intention, nothing will be accomplished. And our main purpose in life is something quite simple on one hand but rather difficult to do on the other. As I’ve mentioned before, what I learned from Fr. Daniel at summer camp a year ago, Our true aim in life is to learn to stay focused on Christ. That without that focus we are scattered, chaotic, & broken.

So, my first priority on each & every day needs to be that I “tend & keep the garden of my heart” through the sacraments, prayer, & reading. And to fight to overcome ignorance, forgetfulness, & idleness.

Tend & keep the garden of my heart.
Tend & keep the garden of my body.
Tend & keep the garden of my environment.

If I can tend & keep these things daily, I can find success. These things aren’t easy to accomplish & there will be many times I find myself not tending them properly. But just like a real garden that develops weeds, I need to pluck the weeds that get in the way of my growing.

This is not easy.

Over & over, I find myself flat on my face. And my typical response is despair.

Well, I’m tired of despair.

Almost 3 years ago I took a course called Six Weeks to Sanity & with it began a journey that will forever change my life. Three months after that I joined the membership group that branched from that course called Filled With L.E.S.S. This group of like-minded ladies all come together to learn how to Live Everyday with Sacred Simplicity.

Within this group there is much talk about intentionality. You must live with intention. As I mentioned above, if we don’t plan with intention nothing will get done. But this intentionality really stayed completely out of my grasp for these last 2 ½ years that I have been working with my Filled With Less group. I didn’t get it. I didn’t quite understand what it meant to go through your day with intention. I thought I understood the concept but actually doing it was a different story.

Until this past week. Something just kind of clicked.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working hard at trying to develop some new habits & in the midst of this endeavor it finally occurred to me that in order to be intentional one must actually use force!!

Tending & keeping the gardens will not just come naturally. I know that the “work” it takes has been talked about a lot in my membership group (& probably numerous books I’ve read or homilies I’ve heard) but for some reason it just never clicked as to what this truly meant. I always found myself saying, “but how?”.

Force! That’s how.

These past couple of weeks I have been forcing myself to follow the plan, some days with great challenges due to my laziness, chaos & whatnot.

Our true aim in life is to learn to stay focused on Christ. That without that focus we are scattered, chaotic, & broken.

I guarantee I have not had focus properly placed & I have not used force.

Force means we get up & pray or go to church, even when we do not feel like it.

Force means going on that morning walk, even when we don’t feel like it.

Force means washing dishes, cleaning floors, & doing laundry, even when we don’t feel like it.

And honestly, once you force yourself to do these things, do you ever regret it???

Never. In fact, I almost always feel so good after forcing myself to do those things that I know I need to do…tending & keeping.

So, success is constantly moving forward with your eyes up & focused on Christ. Working a little every single day at keeping the focus on tending the gardens that bring me closer to God & my ability to share in the joy of the Resurrection daily. More importantly, success is forcing myself to find that focus, again & again, every single day when everything becomes blurry, which it inevitably does.