What is the measure of your success?

For this week’s Sleeping With Bread post (click on the badge at right for more information about the meme), this week’s host Lamont had phrased the questions: “What turned your lights on?” and “What turned your lights off?” instead of the customary ones such as “For what am I most grateful? Least grateful?,” “When did I give and receive the most love? The least love?,” or “When did I feel most alive? Most drained of life?” and so on that we often use.

For me, how to phrase the questions this week isn’t happening as I want to reflect on a different question:

What Is The Measure of Your Success?

I awoke this morning with the song “What is the measure of your success?” by Steve Taylor (push the play button on right side of page to hear the song, sorry my blog posts are interactive). It then got me to thinking about my recent receiving of my W-2 and 1099 for last year. While I won’t share the amounts, out of the opposite of vanity whose proper antonym I can’t find in the thesaurus to describe, I will say this, in temporal terms, it is a pittance, or what many would consider a pitiful sum.

Not to be flippant, but the measure of my success obviously isn’t money. So what is it? How do I measure it? If it’s not money, how do you measure it? It’s easy to say that “in the end, the love you take/ is equal to the love you make,” but actually to attempt to put that into practice is quite another matter. Am I doing that? Am I working on the love I make or, to word it in another less humanistic way, am I spreading the love with which God has graced me?

I like to hope so, in the small ways –

by sharing not only a smile, but also a connection about the book or movie they’re taking out, with the patrons when I work behind the counter at the library.

by carrying out one of my late grandfather’s mannerisms of actually talking with the checkout people and trying to connect with them.

by letting “people in power” (in this case, limited power as with a school district or a borough, but power nonetheless) know when I talk to them for a story for the paper that I understand, or at least, attempt to understand, the bureaucratic and legislative hoops through which they have to jump every day. I should add that I honestly don’t do this out of a need to get a quote or “get the story.” It’s just a small way to let them know I know where they’re coming from (and I know I’m still not wording this right, but the thesaurus doesn’t cover the various nuances in this wasteland between meaning and non-meaning).

I could go on and on with the “bys,” but before I sound too vain (you probably think this post is about me), I’ll stop and say that I’m not always spreading love, that sometimes I, yes, even I, as hard as it may to believe, spread dissent and even hatred with the words I speak and the actions I take.

Lest I spread more dissent and hatred than I already have, I won’t repeat them here (plus out of vainglory, truth be told).

Just as I don’t seem to have the proper words for this post today, I also don’t seem to have the proper ending for this post.

So I’ll just leave you with the question, “What is the measure of your success?” one more time as asked by Steve Taylor, this time from YouTube: