The Unseen Here and Now . . .

2002 Archives

2001 Archives

2000 Archives

Stuart Revercomb

Stuart Revercomb is a marketing consultant and joyously married father of four children. He seems to remember someone once telling him he ought to be a writer. "The Unseen Here and Now" -- Thursdays.

E-MAIL

Click Here
to subscribe to
"Thursday's Fare"

I for one still picture some young dude in a fresh pressed suite driving a shiny convertible having made lots of money in some business endeavor, living the high life. It's my "old definition," formed sometime in my impressionable teens and some version of it still jumps to the front of my mental picture screen until the type of success is further defined. I suppose it's part of the collective consciousness of a competitive and capitalistic American society as well. Talk "success" and most of us jump first to monetary and material considerations.

It is a telling definition and one that speaks more about us than we might care to admit.

Do not get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with success in this sense. To the contrary, honest hard work that produces financial success is what enables our society to provide a standard of living for most of its members far beyond any other system that has proven itself workable in human history. There is a strong message to "live and grow and prosper" within both the Old and New Testaments and Christ's own parables rebuked those that did not invest wisely their "talents" and "salaries." The "Protestant work ethic" is just that -- an ethic, and we lean on it heavily in our expectations of one another as Americans . But it would seem our relentless emphasis on the defining of success along financial lines has led us to a world that is far less caring and compassionate that it could be, and if you believe in the divine nature of scripture, it should be.

Somewhere there's a balance, but it is rare that most of us find it.

Consider pro athletes and entertainment stars, who are certainly the most well-compensated of our society - the most "successful" among us. Typically they fulfill every aspect of my youthful definition of "success," but so many are rarely happy people in any long term sense. The sacrifices necessary to achieve and maintain such careers are often made at the expense of original family and friends, resulting in a litany of divorces and wrecked relationships. The daily headlines testify to the worst cases. In reaching for ever more career success and material wealth, a large portion of the "ultra successful" find themselves spiraling out of control in a self-indulgent lifestyle that leads to a desperate and often cataclysmic end.

Yet we continue our unhealthy obsession with them, raising their hollow images high above us as we ourselves diligently pursue our own smaller yet life-consuming carrots. In the meantime the greater beauty of our lives passes by on the side of the road as the sound of the worn-out wheels on our heavily laden carts drones on.

It seems that we would be better at recognizing our own potential for true happiness.

But there are those among us that are able to keep their perspective -- who do not define their own success in accordance with such a worldly view, and it is they who stand out so bright and real among the lost "successes" of our society.

One such person is actor Ralph Fiennes.

In 1996 Fiennes received an Oscar for his role as Amon Goeth, the ruthless and vile SS Commandant in "Schindler's List" whose emotionless and maniacal lifestyle of sedition and wanton murder make him one of the most heinous villains ever portrayed on the screen. Shortly after making the film, Fiennes gave an interview in which he ironically provided an extraordinary definition of success and what it truly means to be an authentic Human Being.

Fiennes was asked, "hasn't fame and success isolated you from what you were before and those you loved?"

"Success?" Fiennes gave the interviewer a withering look. "Well, I don't know quite what you mean by success? Material success? Worldly success? Personal, emotional success? The people I consider successful are so because of how they handle their responsibilities to other people, how they approach the future, people who have a full sense of the value of their life and what they want to do with it. I call people 'successful' not because they have money or their business is doing well but because, as human beings, they have a fully developed sense of being alive and engaged in a lifetime task of collaboration with other human beings -- their mothers and fathers, their family, their friends, their loved ones, the friends who are dying, the friends who are being born."

"Success ?" he repeated emphatically. "Don't you know it is all about being able to extend love to people? Really. Not in a big capital-letter sense but in the everyday. Little by little, task by task, gesture by gesture, word by word."

If every one of us believed in such a definition -- so that we truly lived it "in the everyday" of our lives, "our world" and "the world" might be a very different place indeed.