“As Desmond Tutu once told me on a recent trip to Cape Town, ‘We are only the light bulbs, Richard, and our job is just to remain screwed in!’”— Richard Rohr, Franciscan priest
When you live this life and walk this world (especially when you scan social media) you will come into contact with other people’s definition of success.
It’s easy to unconsciously take on someone else’s definition, with all the beliefs and expectations that go along with it, right?
It’s tough, but ultimately liberating, to wake up and realize you’ve been chasing someone else’s goals, living someone else’s life.
So the important question to get clear on, as I know we’ve discussed before here, is:
What is success to YOU?
Whatever you decide, I’d like to offer some advice.
I think the key to a successful life, and to being supremely fulfilled in that life, is remembering we are only light bulbs.
Everything that is good is not ours to claim as our own.
Everything that is good does not and has never come from you.
It is the alignment, the connection with a higher power that allows the magic to come through you.
Yes, you choose, you work hard, you stay aligned … but really you had nothing to do with it, except for surrender to it.
And that is humbling, and somehow reassuring, and also enlightening.
If all the good that we have ever done in our lives has come from a connection with something bigger than our tiny little over-thinking, over-controlling minds …
… Our priority – if we want more magic and good in our lives, if we want success – is to stay screwed into source.
So reflect on that next time you feel too busy to stop, to practice, to remember, to create a rock solid connection with your higher Self —
You’re literally cutting yourself off.
In the mad chase to DO, you prevent all being and the nourishment for your doing.
Screw yourself in. Make this the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, make it the foundation to everything you do and everything you are.
Go well!
Arjuna