On Waves and Success

"Humans are amphibians-half spirit and half animal... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation-the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life-his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth, periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it."

An excerpt of the Screwtape Letters, written from the perspective of a master tempter (a devil)

I've been trying to figure out what it means to be successful; there are a lot of definitions. One common definition is that success is never giving up. I believed this definition for several years, but it seemed like the harder I tried, the worse off I was. The world is so captivating that I lose myself in poor choices and I never give up on those choices because I think I'm heading in the right direction. I've gone in the wrong direction so many times that I'm losing faith in my ability to move forward. Forward progress has been my definition of success because it doesn't matter how small the improvement is, because little steps will get me there someday. The problem is that when I try to take a little step forward, a gust of wind blows me back. And after years of trying to finish the race, it feels like I haven't even left the starting line.

The C. S. Lewis quote above has been on my mind for the last few months because I'm thinking my definition of success needs to change. The undulation of life, as Lewis puts it, is a lot like oscillation in the following graphic. They wave goes up and down the Y-axis as it moves through time. If we were to only watch the Y-axis, the wave's amplitude appears to limit the waves potential. I mean, why can't it go higher? 

For the last several years, I've been looking at my success through the lens of the Y-axis. I thought that the higher the wave went, the more progress I was making, but what I've come to realize, is that there is a limit to my amplitude. There is a limit to how far I can stretch myself and I've been hitting that limit a lot lately. I've been confused at why I can't be better in what I pursue because I misunderstand where I am and where I should be looking. I'm the one drawing the wave as it travels through time. And part of life is that sometimes I'm on a downswing and sometimes I'm on an upswing. If I look back along the X-axis, I'll see my progress through time. However, success is not progress through time. If that were the case, simply staying alive would be considered success. Despite my confusion about amplitude, success is still found on the Y-axis, it's just not shown in the photo above. Each point on the line represents a moment where I had to make a choice and those choices are how I'm going to measure my success from now on. What did I decide to do during the low moments? What did I do during the high moments? How did my choices affect the people around me? What legacy am I leaving behind? These are the questions I'm going to ask myself from now on.

I'm not going to ask if I have more money than a year ago, or more friends, or more skills, or if I can swim faster, run faster, or solve problems faster. Those metrics measure the amplitude of my life, but I want a better measure of who I am. Even though the above explication is complex, the wave oversimplifies things. There are so many other factors that will keep the undulation of life complicated.

One last thing to consider with waves is the average amplitude of all the points on the wave is at the X-axis. We spend most of our life away from the extremes, with a few moments of pure joy and a few moments of utter despair. It's the zero average that makes us feel as though we aren't getting anywhere, but maybe we aren't supposed to be going somewhere.

The idea proposed by C.S. Lewis draws on a theory from Heraclitus that there is nothing permanent except change. Or in other words, life is constantly changing and that is the only true constant. I, on the other hand, find myself in Parmenides' camp, that nothing ever changes and that is why we can't actually progress forward or become something new. Instead, we are trying to discover what is already exists. We go through time in order to discover who we really are, and this discovery is the purpose of life. We know we were put into this mortal experience for a reason, and our job now is to discover why.

In the song "Go the Distance" from Disney's Hercules, Hercules thinks he needs to accomplish some great journey to be successful. This distance, however, is metaphorical and really about Hercules' discovery about who he is. He doesn't go from not being a god to being one because he was a god his entire life. I don't know if I'm a god, but I am something. And whatever that something's purpose is, I hope to find out someday.

(Ancient Greeks really are the foundation of western civilization and culture...)