Twitteretter

When it comes to living life, one of the choices to be made is whether to just live it, day to day, slowly advancing towards death without a narrative, or whether to search for meaning, to try to make your life count for something, to make a difference (whatever you may find your meaning in). Searching for meaning may make life more fulfilling, at least when you find it. The searchers like to think so. But, also, searching makes life undoubtedly harder. It is not enough to just live, the searchers demand more, expect more from their existence. As a consequence, what would for others be a perfectly fine day, for the searcher is a day wasted, if it does not contribute to the existential narrative. The temptation of nihilism is always there, the void, its tempting mindless rest, which the searcher, at times of exhaustion, envies of others. But, alas, once you choose meaning, giving into the void would be admitting defeat, calling it quits, which the searcher, invariably, refuses to do Len...

George M Moore Jr, an US veteran bound to a wheelchair by a fighter jet crash during the Vietnam War has become famous by his quote ‘A winner is just a loser who tried one more time’. This was put even more eloquently and much more profoundly by Samuel Beckett in what may be my favourite quote: ‘Ever tried, ever failed, no matter. Try again, fail again, fail better’. They both mean the same, success is the result of many failures, of small steps on the road of improvement. But success is deceiving. We often see it in others only when reached, so we miss the journey. In our culture of celebrity, people enter our field of vision once they succeed, and we don’t see the toil and sweat spent to get there. This creates a false expectation, condemning us to disappointment when we do not succeed easily, tempting us to give up and therefore fail the Moore, or Beckett, test. Understanding success as a process may be the most important tool in your luggage when setting off on the journey of life ...