Sometimes throughout the years, you find yourself going through life muddling your way through and surviving day to day. Focusing on your family, your job, all the things you need to “DO”. Marking off that to do list.

THEN… an opportunity pops up that you weren’t expecting and it feels right, you are presented with something you never knew you wanted and it’s a struggle to rise to the occasion, but you do. And you get better at it and you start feeling good about overcoming those obstacles and getting better at this “new” thing, and you feel good about it.

Suddenly, right about the time you start feeling ok with how you’re handling it, it’s taken from you. You didn’t do anything wrong, but it feels like you did and you can’t seem to quite go back to life the way it was, because you realized you were just spinning your wheels and you weren’t making the impact you were supposed to make before.

You want better, you want more for you and your family, but you aren’t quite sure what that looks like. You thought it was this thing that seemed to fall in your lap because you did a good job, but looking back, you feel like you were just used to get through a transition, but you tasted something that felt different and you struggle with the loss of it.

The urge to beat yourself up because as old as you are, you should have done more, known what your dream for yourself was, know what makes you feel alive and wanted and necessary and important in the world and have already done THAT thing. But then, is a job or a career really what should make us feel that?

I will ALWAYS value my relationships with family and friends over any job or career. I feel successful, or not, based on my relationships with those I love the most. And even those have weathered some storms.

So, is relationship success based on how those I’m in relationship with feel about me, or is it how I feel about them? Or is the “success” based on how much you did right in the relationship or how much you did wrong? Does the wrong outweigh the good, can the good outweigh the bad?

Or, is it deeper?

Maybe success is the wrong word?

Maybe we should never feel successful in any area because we have to feel shaken up and unsettled in order to keep striving for more, for better. But I don’t think that means things need to be chaotic and stressful in a negative kind of way either!

Maybe success isn’t really the goal? So, what is?