"Success means having the courage, the determination, and the will to become the person you believe you were meant to be."

- George Sheehan (American physician, author and running enthusiast, 1918-1993)

Now that I think of it, I always had this powerful drive. Always. Was it "ambition"? Maybe. I really have no idea if they were/are one and the same. So, if we are, indeed, born into the parents we choose, to work out our galactical shit in this body, at this time, then one of the constant bumpers in my life has been this drive thing. If it has anything to do with DNA/genetics, then I got it from my mother. Without question. Because as I have long understood and said, my father was the least ambitious (most ambition-less?) Jewish male I may have ever known. Just never seemed to want "more". My mother, who never achieved much in the ways that people often keep score, was, with her highschool education and going to work at 18, somewhat of a force of nature, as I have come to realize. Although basically no one who is a present presence in my life now, other than relatives, met her, anyone who ever did, remembered her. I actually got some reminders recently on Facebook from some old Inwood chums with whom I reconnected virtually about the power of memory. The things we take away from some people. I have no idea whether my mother's desire for "morebetter" was always there, as some kind of lens with which to look forward, to get away from whatever her present moments felt like, of if it was triggered by her getting sick young, and simply wanting my father to want more for and from him. For us. The American Dream. It's hard to get answers because there's really no one to ask. Even Dad, his vision of his wife, the mother of his kid, frozen somewhat in time, and his mind. I don't even want, or need, any answers for me at this point, to "make sense" of anything. It's really only about my recent obsession, in all areas, with context. Because content, without context, doesn't have the same resonance for me. The notions we feel don't just live in silos. I achieved so much, I am told driven by myself, as a young kid, I often had wondered whether it never got any better for me than when I was 12. And, I remember realizing, particularly after my Mom died, whether I was motivated to please her, whether any of the external stuff that seemed important, was HER priorities, not mine. Particularly when my puppetteer went away, laying down the sticks, with the marionette now trying to learn to walk on its own.

So, the drive/ambition piece got confusing because in certain ways, I started to grow up at a time when "men were men and women were women." Except in my house (I know that's not the case, it just felt that way). I witnessed a man constantly being pushed, and reminded. Of what isn't, or what wasn't. Not of what was. And, still is - Jerry Pillot, my father, as a sweet man. The Dad who everyone liked. Yet for whom, as a teen, I felt embarrassed, unsure, disconnected. Not a "male role model", I grew into a man who felt caught between trying to balance being "nice" with the notion of achieving success. I didn't even know what that meant, since all it seemed was a notion that was external and alien. I saw Dad as "weak", and it's now so sad to me that it was, at least in part, because I saw him through my mother's eyes. The power of her suggestion. Her words, I am quite sure. Her energy. Her zest and zetz. It's hard when someone wants more for you than you want for yourself. When they have an attachment to YOUR outcome. Particularly when you (me, we) don't even KNOW what it is that we want. For ourselves. For so many years, the scariest question anyone could ever ask me was, "What do you want?" I had no clue, everything seemingly filtered through something else, making someone else happy, or right. And, when we have not nurtured those muscles inside, the only way we can figure out what it is indeed that we want, at any moment, is to simply go out there, and fall down, and pick ourselves up when we fall down. If we stay in that cocoon of others, we stymie an opportunity to grow, to move, to stand for ourselves. To learn to be able to answer that "what do you want?" question from a place of inner knowing, from the warmth of our hearth.

I'm not sure why I have been thinking about this lately, maybe it has to do with me starting to align with my drive. For the first time from a place of ownership. Because I know that my confusion about what it meant to be successful, and ambitious, got all mucked up in a way that it took awhile to find myself out of the emotional thin ice. How much are we affected by our primary same sex parental role model? I think quite alot. I sense a bit of Cooper's feeling around about the notion of what "being a man" is all about, certainly colored by who HIS father is. I saw success not only as not connected to being a male, I often resented my father for not having "taught" me the basics. And, yes, as it turned out, I have been surely trying to figure it out along the way and have created my own somewhat malereality...my OWN definition. Yet those skill sets that Jerry Pillot had no clue how to impart with me, have often felt like missing links...like the science courses I never took, the lack of direct knowledge bearing on my view of the world. The choices I made. I never FELT successful. Certainly in my marriage, where the reminders were certainly on what I WASN'T doing or achieving, the external pushes on me being about "more" and "better" and "different." When the notion of success was measured by standards that no longer felt right, or when the road to get there was only accepted if someone else's conditions were satisfied. It took a long and winding path to discover that for me, true success could only happen when I am aligned with my purpose, when what I am doing and who I am have a deeper connective tissue. And, as these last years have found me finding that way, being more comfy in my skin than ever before, I am struck by how much I have been healing my relationship with Dad. By accepting him, in ways that Mom never could, apparently. And, it's not lost on me that this woman who so seemed to want what was outside of herself, for whatever reason, never made it past 48 (there are, of course biology at play as well), and that the man with the "whatever the case may be" sensibility that certainly at times felt more emotionally lazy than "really" going with the flow, is still playing golf past 90. There's alot in there to pay attention to...

And that George Sheehan quote at the top? Kind of blew my mind when I saw it., as I have been saying over the last few years that I am finally becoming (starting to become?) the person I always felt I deserve(d) to be...all this stuff surely walks hand-in-hand...