Success

I was just thinking about success.  I read an article -- actually, about half an article; it was pretty depressing -- about how people tend to not end up in life where they thought they would.  These are people with a Plan - go to college, get married, Good Job - all of that.  And then things happen, and they get derailed -- the woman gets pregnant and drops out, or the guy gets someone pregnant and drops out; the marriage doesn't work, or it's barely habitable (when I say that, I think of my niece, who dated a guy for two years, lived with him, and then got married; six months later, they were divorced; how does that even happen?)  And as for the Good Job -- they likely exist, still, but the chances of getting one of them sometimes feels like throwing a coin into a bottle from five kilometers in the air. You can do it, but you have to be awfully damned lucky.

You can see why I thought the article was depressing.  It was basically saying you can never count on being happy.  And the thing is, I agree with that.  I think that if you assume that of course things will go well, because, unlike the rest of the world, you have a Plan, and maybe even a Back-up Plan - then you're probably going to get a nasty surprise.  Not necessarily -- if you're born into wealth and privilege (I'm not; how about you?) then your reserves are deeper, your cushions more resilient, so those derailments might not have as much an effect on you as on others.  But if you're just an average sort -- smart, hard-working, but without a firm plan -- then these surprises can happen.

I've had a couple of surprises in life.  Nothing earth-shattering, just: things happened to me that I thought only happened to unlucky or stupid people. Although I suppose you could extrapolate and say that because they happened to me, I was unlucky or stupid, at least at the time.  But, whatever the reason, things happened.  (Which is not to say that good surprises didn't happen - they did.  But those aren't the ones you remember.)  So when they happen, how do you survive, let alone prosper?

People who are young and bright and Have All The Answers will say that you can survive and prosper in any environment.  They point to your tech millionaires and billionaires who bet large on something, lost it all, won most of it back.  I don't doubt that.  But I think that such actions are outside the pale for most people.  I think for most people, recovery takes time, and if it happens at all, it happens slowly. You make reasonable moves, you set reasonable goals that will be good if you make them, but won't devastate you if you don't -- and you keep going.  And one day, you look at where you are, and where you've been, and you think you know.....this isn't all that bad.  In fact  -- if you're lucky  -- this is pretty good.

And that's what I'd call success.