But, decisions are made for us a lot more often than we care to acknowledge. Sure, we make choices, come to conclusions, take action and work at things that makes us believe that we’re running the show, but truly the path, the direction, the trajectory of our lives seems to be handed to us in a series of small choices from the cosmos, whether we’re even aware of it or not; a left turn when we would have gone right, a stop when we felt like starting, a risk when we wanted to play it safe.

Awareness isn’t the key here, though, I would say that the key is not submitting to the fact that the cosmos guides our life direction, but rather how we deal with the circumstances, how we deal with the trajectory, do we resist or move with the current of life to some end that we can neither conceive or imagine, to an outcome that is uniquely ours. I hope that I am able to stay with the current of life, somehow,  so far, that’s been so much more than anything I could have conceived or imagined.

Success is based on appearance, not reality; I read this in Robert X. Cringley’s Accidental Empires and it was like a cosmic lightning strike to my being. I’ve always struggled with this, because success, so often, does in fact seem to be based on appearance rather than reality. The problem with appearances is that they yield nothing but a vision, a concept, an idea. But what do you do when the veneer of the appearance starts to crack? More work is required to keep up the appearance than to have done the thing that the appearance was created for or explained why it couldn’t be done and/or made other plans to begin with.

Appearance-based “success” that’s based on a tangible, is really what I’m talking about here, and to call this a success without any real tangible being delivered isn’t success at all. Successful relay of a vision, concept or idea, when the outcome is a tangible isn’t a success but rather a snow job dressed up as success. This is logic, though, however, and the human condition, through its very essence nullifies logic. So there it is. I’ve reconciled it, success is how things look not how thing are.

I’ll keep trying for success based on what is rather than the appearance, though…