How Far Success Lets You Fall

Success feels great. For a moment. Then comes the next step, and the next, and you don’t notice that you’re no longer walking but climbing. And anyone who climbs eventually looks down.

I climbed high. And at the top, I recognized the fall height. And I fell.

That’s not a tragedy. That’s physics. Whoever rises can fall. But they don’t tell you that when they sell you success. They show you the top. They leave out the bottom.

Success is happiness. It’s written nowhere, but it’s written everywhere. In every conversation, in every decision, in every glance at what someone has or doesn’t have. It’s so deep inside us that we don’t notice it. It’s not even a thought. It’s the air we think in.

And then the sentences we say: Money isn’t important to me. It’s about the cause. I do this for myself. Conversations don’t consist of truths. Conversations consist of self-deceptions that sound good. We say them so often that we believe them. And because we believe them, we don’t notice that they’re lying.

After the fall, I started looking differently. Not at what’s being shown. At what’s in between. The spaces between hold different information. That’s where you see what is. Not what’s being presented. That’s where you see the mask. First the masks of others. Then your own.

Your own is the hardest. Not because it fits so well. But because it feels like the face.

I wanted to know what happiness is when success drops away. Not as philosophy. Not as life wisdom. As an honest question with no clear answer. The answer can’t be found. It comes on its own when the lying ends.

All I know is that it doesn’t lie in what we tell each other. It lies in what moves when we stop lying to ourselves and start telling the other person the truth.

That’s not a thought that fades when the next one comes. Not a story we make ourselves believe. But movement.

The truth is right in front of us. But do we really want to see it that clearly.