Success, Love, and New Beginnings
It’s late January and pretty cold and gray in this little corner of the world, but I’m hopeful: good things are coming. The Lunar New Year and St. Valentine’s Day are just around the corner with their promises of love and new beginnings and opportunities for success.
Can I get a Halleluja?
I’d like to mention, in a brief digression, that 2024 is the year of the Wood Dragon, and I am thrilled because I am a Wood Dragon. This particular combo only comes around once in a lifetime and can I just say, I … am … ready. Seriously ready. A Dragon year is purported to bring good fortune (Yes!), passion (Hell yes!), and new opportunities (Get in here! Let’s go!)
I’m thinking a lot about these things lately — about love and success. Being at the beginning of a new year and coming off a year of tremendous and difficult change, I sat in my cozy spot the other morning and considered where I am at this point in my journey. Immediately, my mind went to thoughts of age and income: sadly, the hotest topics in my brain of late, and the thoughts were not happy ones; they started to send me into a funk. But then, surprisingly, miraculously, I stopped myself and began to look at my definition of success and my beliefs around my own self-worth.
I’ve spent years under-valuing what I do and who I am, believing I was not successful based on societal metrics of fame and fortune. I drank the cultural Kool-Aid that equates success with money. It’s taken me a long time to emerge from that delusion; but reflecting on all I have learned and experienced and what I believe in my deepest Self to be true, I now see just how intricately, intimately success is connected not with money or followers, but with Love.
There is a profound difference between worldly success and true success. While money may be the coin of this realm, there is another realm that we inhabit, a realm of which we are not often aware. Like fish, unaware that they swim in a sea of water, we are unaware that our sea is Spirit, which, for me, is Love.
We inhabit both worlds, simultaneously: the profound and the profane. I don’t make six figures — far from it — but I’ve been privileged to be allowed into peoples most painful and intimate sufferings, shared from my heart, written three books, raised two, kind and lovely humans, rescued my fair share of dogs, been (mostly) kind and loved many people. How, I asked myself, could I not consider this success?
Now, don’t get me wrong: I like money quite a lot. I live in this human realm and have my share of material needs and desires, and I know from past good fortune that having abundant money is both fun and helpful. But it doesn’t buy love. It doesn’t buy happiness. It doesn’t buy success. Neither do the letters after your name or the square footage of your house. When you come right down to it — and by that I mean facing the end of your life — the only meaningful success is Love: that you gave it and received it. To be connected with your Spirit, to the pure energy and joy of Love, is without question the greatest success there is.
So, while the advent of this Dragon year does have me hopeful for fortune and passion and new opportunities (because being able to pay one’s bills is a helpful thing, and la dolce vita in Italy with one’s amore is passion plus), I realize, as I create my mental vision board of all my wishes, hopes, and dreams, that what I really want is Love. I want love to infuse every facet of my life: my relationship with work, friends, animals, nature, strangers, the Divine — myself. I want to give and receive Love abundantly in all its many manifestations. I want to remember, daily, that it is the sea in which I swim.
KATE INGRAM, MA, CSBC, is a Wood Dragon 🐲, certified coach, counselor, writer and award-winning author. Discover more at kintsugicoaching.com
