succeed – Live & Learn

But now, Dorothy wondered: What was failure? What was success? Ribbons swirling in a cold tank. Life was not a story that ended on a resolution or a revelation. It was like this puppet show—a gentle, ongoing state of ups and downs that contained moments of illusory transcendence and ultimately built to nothing, no epiphanies, or so many epiphanies that they ran together and were forgotten. Maybe it breathed like a paper flower, expanding and contracting. Maybe it was something you did just to pass the time.

— Christine Smallwood, The LIfe of the Mind (Hogarth, March 2, 2021)

Photo: Lily

What many discover is that the need to do, accomplish, and succeed perpetually replenishes itself. My father regarded lulls not as a grace but rather as enemies. His generational, class, and personal baggage was such that the only thing that mattered was Work (of the big W variety, not the small w work of cleaning up and tending to family life). Work was a form of mesmerism and ego refuge: best to keep going.

~ Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

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