Most colorful, interesting people have many positive qualities; you’ll find they usually have the following in common: “They are curious; they love to discover new ideas, places, people, and interests. They are expressive; they’re not scared to speak their minds and express themselves well. They take initiative; they don’t sit around waiting for permission to do what they want to do, and they like to try new things. They are inventive; they think outside of the box and constantly come up with original ideas and new ways of doing things. They are confident; they are not scared to make mistakes and act like they know what they are doing, even when they don’t.” (1)
Memories
Many people often speak of some past occurrence with either a religious reverence or an eye-wincing distain. This key happening colors their life and subsequent actions. It is a piece of personal trauma that stays with them for the remainder of their physical existence and, ultimately, defines them: think of the writer O. Henry. (1) With that thought in mind, I watched an interview with Dr. Viktor Frankl on YouTube: Finding meaning in difficult times (Interview with Dr. Viktor Frankl). If any human being deserves to be a piece of semi-alive humanity, a shell of his former self, it is this man. Instead, you are presented with a dynamic, wise and warm individual. How is this possible, you may ask? Dr. Frankl tells us that it is about perception, our own brand of hope, if you will. How we see the world, not the circumstance itself, is what defines us. “The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him?
Freedom
It is easy as an old man to sit back and pontificate about life, work and freedom. You find yourself very promptly marginalized because the question is succinctly posed: “At almost sixty, what can you possibly know about my life at twenty or twenty-five?” The truth is straightforward: “Nothing!” One of the harshest realizations in life is that you are forced to follow Socrates dictum – to paraphrase: “I know that I know nothing!”
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Emotion
Everyone has experienced disappointment in life. It is the “measure of a man” in how he responds to such an event. The concept of the “heart” has a lot of cachet in English. Historically, the heart was seen as the center of a person’s being: one’s moral character or essence. Many times the concept was seen in political situations when a person’s body and heart were actually buried separately. One of the more famous is Marshal Pilsudski of the Second Polish Republic. (1) His heart is buried in Vilnius, now part of Lithuania and his body is buried in Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, Poland. Here are a few examples of “heart” in common usage:
Real Success
The most difficult thing, I have found, is defining you. Now there is a plethora of people who are ready to tell you who you are – or should be. This leaves very little room for you to negotiate your own reality. Who is in this discussion you may ask? I am not because I am not yet complete. What I am doing is slowly “waking up” and posing those necessary existential questions: Why am “I” here? Where am I going? What should I do with my life? But beware we must be: at this time authority figures, our parents, our friends, our siblings, literally wash over us with advice: all well intentioned, but misplaced. This fills us with yet more questions. It all seems too confusing and, in another way, so pointless. You begin to take special notice of the misanthropes: the broken souls with vacuous eyes. “There is no purpose to life” is an oft recited phrase. But, there is: