Thursday Thoughts
What is success? What is progress?
The other day I was doing a card reading for myself. I’ve recently gotten into oracle and tarot card reading. Make of that what you will, but it’s been informative and affirming in a time that I’ve needed it. I got a lot of good messages in the reading, and then at the end I found myself just talking to Whoever Might Be Listening–guides, ancestors, angels, etc. I really don’t know what I believe about most things, but I do know to follow the nudges that my intuition gives me. I’m working on not needing to know the “how” of everything.
In the process of that conversation, I ended up talking about how I’d been reading over my past journals, and feeling discouraged that no progress had been made over these many years. Whoever Was Listening was DEEPLY offended by this, and called me up short. How dare I say that I hadn’t made any progress, simply because it hadn’t made me money?!
In the past fifteen years I’ve:
Left the toxic religion I was raised in
Rethought and restructured my political/racial/sexual orientation/gender ideologies
Learned to live with chronic illness
Began discovering my artistic voice
Constantly explored new ideas and thoughts
Learned about systemic issues in our society from disability issues to the workplace that have shifted how I live and move through our world.
It’s hard to put everything in list form to be honest, because there was just this massive, MASSIVE shift in my paradigm about, basically, everything. Yet, at the end of the day, They were absolutely right: I’d decided all of that meant nothing because I still haven’t figured out how to make money. Ergo, I’m still living in poverty, ergo I’m not successful, ipso facto I have accomplished nothing.
Whoa.
How fucked up is that? No wonder Whoever Was Listening was so offended. The roots of capitalism run deep, my friend. We talk a lot these days about how toxic this idea is that we must always be productive, but, for me at least, this was the first time I realized that even being “productive” is not enough if you’re not making money. That’s the mindset we’re dealing with, and the one we must begin to question.
I apologized to Whoever Was Listening, because yes, that really is a smack in the face to everyone and everything that has been guiding me, protecting me, and holding me through the whole process of this thing we call life.
I’m still thinking about this, and still trying to figure out how all this gets reconciled in a world where we do need money to live, and where poverty is a crushing weight for so many. I may never figure that out. What I know right now is that I no longer look at those years as wasted, and that is a start.