Let's Be Successful Again!

Saving the world

I've just discovered Justin Rowlatt, the BBC's Ethical Man. He and his family spent a year trying to cut their carbon emissions. Now he's travelling across America to save the world. These are his words - he is going to save the world!

I love his language. He is an optimist and his journey isn't smulzy (as they say in the USA). I watched his film about the Amish with joy. He seems able to connect with people in a gentle and respectful manner - pretty unusual in today's journalists. 

It occurs to me that despite everything that's going on at the moment, we are developing an appetite for a positive outlook. Maybe it really is the spirit of the war bringing out the best in us.  We seem to care more about each other and the planet when we are feeling the pressure.

Where there used to be no "good news stories" we now find a peppering of features about people who have succeeded, people who are doing important work, people who entertain us. We want to make a contribution by buying fair trade products or by recycling our cardboard or by giving to charity.

Watching the lives of the Amish in Justin Rowlatt's little film made me realise how much excess there still is in our lives though. We may feel pride at buying our rice from the cut-price shelf (there was a little tear in the bag meaning it was down to 50p) or at growing a few spuds in the garden. And it is certainly better to do something than nothing at all. But there are people who live on far less and certainly seem to have some quality of life we are missing. Yes, many people are leaving the Amish way of life and who can blame them - long hours, few comforts, a small insular community. But there is also something very appealing about a simple, uncluttered life.

And if this recent "good cheer" I have been noticing isn't a figment of my imagination and is the result of a realisation that we enjoy a challenge, maybe we would be even more cheerful if we had a little less.

 

What's good here?

A friend sent me an interview with the Dalai Lama today and I was struck, as always, by his positive yet down-to-earth attitude to life and the world in general. The theme of the interview was Happiness (something we are rather dismissive of in our culture, preferring Fulfilment or Satisfaction because we believe Happiness is transient and, even, not a worthwhile goal.

One sentence stood out in particular - The journalist interviewing the Dalai Lama summed up his attitude as: You make your way to happiness not by fretting about it or trafficking in New Age affirmations, but simply by finding the cause of your suffering, and then attending to it, as any doctor (of mind or body) might do.

Of course, as a person of action I would like this. It justifies my belief that we can bring about huge changes in both our circumstances and our attitudes if we choose. Clearly we won't always choose Happiness. We may want or need to be sad, to mourn, to face a hardship...there is nothing wrong with choosing a difficult path and facing our fears or with having a natural reaction when something bad happens.

But most of the time we are not faced with huge hardship or great sadness. We just don't choose Happiness because we don't think we can. We wait for it to hit us between the eyes and often miss it because we aren't consciously seeking it. 

This might seem a rather irrelevant tangent in a blog about success but it isn't if you define success in a broader way. And if Happiness can come about through a shift of mindset rather than requiring a perfect set of circumstances to align and coincide with a day where we also got out of the bed on the right side, then that means success is closer to all of us than we might think.