November 20, 2007
-
The Best Fortune in the World
You will be successful in everything.That’s what my fortune cookie said. And you know, I can’t imagine a better prediction for one’s personal future. It’s pretty much the ideal fortune cookie. It’s what everyone wants to hear even if they won’t admit it. That all that they will put their mind to, however crazy or unlikely, they will succeed. Somehow.This makes me want to go out and do something quite nearly impossible. Right now. I should go try something unlikely and see what happens. I could try to take over the world, or bring about world peace, or cure cancer, or become an astronaut, or something you know? How could it go wrong? I mean, after all I will be successful in everything. The fortune cookie said so. And if you can’t trust the powers that generate random slips of paper wrapped in dough, who can you trust?Success is a funny thing though. The more units of success you have does not imply the more units of happiness you obtain. There’s no correlation. For many greater success only leads to more longing and a deeper emptiness. And yet, I think, the more units of failure you have, or what you consider to be a personal failure, whatever the world thinks of it, the more unhappy you are likely to become. You don’t have to of course. You can be so positive that failures wash off you like sand swept away by the ocean currents. But most of us are not like that. Failure hurts. You need a minimal level of success to create the opportunities for happiness.
Actually I think it has little to do with success or failure at all. Just confidence. Just faith. When you have those your failures seems less like failures and your successes bring you greater happiness. When you lack them, all the striving and success in the world will only lead to an unsatisfying illusion. That’s what I think anyways.
So maybe my fortune wasn’t the best in the world after all. The best might be something like this:
You will always find happinessI hope I get that fortune soon.
