A Saturday morning thought...

[alexpgp]

The effect of books, like that of some kinds of vaccines, wears off over time. In most cases this is a benign phenomenon, with something of an upside and a downside.

The upside is the ability to read books read long ago as if they were new to you (for me, Agatha Christie's novels come to mind here); the downside involves losing whatever it was that affected your life, oh, so long ago.

For me, Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning, falls into the second category. I am rereading the 1984 edition of the book, and found the following gem:

Don't aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

I will be thinking about this throughout the day, as I do some translation and a lot of cleaning! But for the moment, it's time for another cup of coffee!

Cheers...

Comments

[daphnis.livejournal.com]

Learning to aim for the best possible outcome for many people goes against our greedy 'I--me--mine' instincts, as Frankl says, but it leads us into more fertile territories and shared happiness.

I probably didn't need to tell you that, but I'm easy to delete!