On Victory

It's never the point, is it?

It's fleeting. It doesn't provide. I mean there is the endorphin reaction, sure. But anything worth celebrating is usually won at great cost against great adversity. And for what? To take in the moment and go home?

It's not about the end but what comes after. It's about utilizing the prestige or the momentum to great effect. It's about continuing on in a greater state than you were before.

I have this habit of writing to fulfill a sense of productivity, like depositing change in a bank. And I think if I can just get my hands loose I'll continue and write my fiction and my poetry. But instead I allow this feeling of satisfaction, this false accomplishment, to take the place of anything else I might do that would actually mean something.


It calms me down. Admittedly the act is an escape. I write something to avoid writing THE thing. I never thought that each poem and each completed short would simply be a step in a building process of my own strength as a writer. I mean we know this as common sense - that people who do something often get better at it. But I think my perspective viewed the outcome as the goal, not as one long continuous evolution of effort. So I'd write for the day and forget about it. I'd eat for the moment and forget about it. I'd earn a paycheck from work and use it as I need it but not as I choose to invest it. Each repetitive thing we ignore is valuable in the pursuit of a great living state IF we understand the worth of victory as a practice.

Victory or success or winning, all mean you have a temporary edge. It's confidence. It's being known perhaps. It's an opportunity to be listened to and taken seriously.

On the road to public success must be an infinite amount of private ones. There certainly are an infinite amount of private failures I can account for, otherwise I wouldn't be home in my pajamas for the last 3 days playing games on my laptop. Now there is a habit well constructed and afforded by the genius in interactive entertainment. How can a person with the aptitude for over 12 hours of focus, easily, have it susceptible to the particular stimulus of the digital medium and not be able to wield it on command?

I thought wanting something and achieving it were arbitrarily related. Now I see that the tools best suited are not aptly applied as a rule in some cases. Crossed wiring?

But like any program, a command change in one line can alter the function. They way I viewed tasks made the approach seem laborious. But looking beyond the final word of the story, beyond the development of the script, beyond the choice to try, beyond the eventual success of achievement, and I am confronted by an ideal state by which I can do . . . some real good in this world.

Well I'm not sure if I truly believe that. For every idea I have there are people that would attack it and maybe the best ideas are never seen that way until they've been marketed right. Trying to find the true good in the middle of all the things that seem to come close is impossible. Sometimes it seems like humans were never meant to agree. But then there's victory and you can't be victorious in the way we are used to without it being recognized by those around you.

It's a moment of communion but that isn't the point now. It just resembles something that we are all attracted to... And I suppose those that are watching want to be a part of it. So victory becomes a greater statement about what we all want in the world, the quality within us to offer something important. And then-to do just that.

If I look at meeting goals as having the right to meet another and taking joy in each accomplishment, then I would never cease in my effort and I would accomplish a great deal.

My challenge exists in all the habits formed prior to this new practice, where there was no importance beyond the act or beyond the day. I've had so much time to lose my sense of urgency that now, when I'm trying to create a sense of perpetual joy while acting upon a realized freedom to succeed, I am faced with a wall of complacency.

In games we are provoked into action and we call it stimulus. We are attacked and we find within us the nature to respond, to end the conflict, to resolve the turmoil, to save the day or overcome the challenge otherwise. But when realizing our own worth we are faced with the infinite. I don't know where to begin at first because I'm thinking of some goal that doesn't exist.

Victory isn't a goal, it's a state of existence. One instance of success MUST role into another. It is the waves of motion in the ocean, it is the steady self-perpetuating rhythm of our hearts. Success is life and death every day, a cycle that has allowed humanity to form. So success in the heart and mind must not be constricted . . .

We call it hard work and seek to escape it. We seek to relax and think we owe it to ourselves to rest. But when it's the right work and we use that same formula we are missing the point. This is the problem, or part of it at least.

I believe investment is dangerous, I am programmed to avoid my commitment. It's not that I don't want to write but I have a strong sense that I shouldn't and I can't figure out the one root and this is how I know that wanting something isn't enough. The feeling, it's the feeling. There is a lot of hesitation when I think about acting. Hesitation and fear as if I stood before something too important to touch but would be mine if I felt the conviction of being worthy of it.

It's an honest question poised to me from something ultimately beyond my understanding:

DO I REALLY WANT THIS? IS IT REALLY MINE? DO I HAVE THE RIGHT?

There is no judgement in the question because all the consequences are known and accounted for somewhere. It's just a question for me and about me and no one truly knows what it feels to be asked it in my shoes and know one should ever care.

The universe is benevolent and just. The void it contains eclipses our understanding, our perspective, our reality. You do not accept deals with it lightly if you do not know your place, and yet men do it easily enough in their ignorance and plow forward through history recklessly and call it it bravery. There is a modicum of bravery sure, when facing the unknown.

But it is far more terrible to face the full request and consequence of your existence and choose the path forward once you understand the importance of the part you can play.

So we come at last to the famous saying "Be careful what you wish for." It is a lesson in the heart of me that I do not take lightly and it is disguised by humility, thought it is truly a fear of my own capacity; of the image I must invoke, the person I must become to allow for all the effort I am as yet unfamiliar with in this life. But the choice is not fleeting, it stays with me and stares at me and waits. It is the patience of it that is unnerving and makes me feel like I have a debt to pay.