There Was A Crack In My Definition Of Success
There was a crack in my definition of success.
We have been turned away from the British Airways lounge at Rome airport. We do not have the right documentation. We are Aer Lingus and the email giving us permission to enter must be printed. I mutter something about it being 2024, that we don’t have access to a printer. The woman taps her nails and refuses to be moved. Rules are rules. There are printing facilities on Level 1, but the girl there doesn’t know how to connect to the wi-fi. We run out of time.
“You know,” I say to my husband as we head to the departure gate, “only I could meet someone at check-in who has had a religious experience”. I conclude that all the staff in “Leonardo da Vinci” Fiumicino have embraced la dolce vita. They are slow. They arrive at their desks and shuffle paperwork and chat and look at their watches and yawn. The queue is snaking around the terminal. We just want to get rid of our luggage. There is a man in front of us. He is manoeuvring a large suitcase. Every now and then, he stops and squints into his mobile. He leaves a gap in the queue, but we are too polite to ask him to move forward. After forty-five minutes, he suddenly moves out of the line. He abandons his place and stands to the side. He is continuing to study his phone. He is leaning on a walking stick. I am not sure what to do. I nudge my husband who may or may not have noticed him. “Do you think he needs help?” I say. We debate whether to ask him. In the end, I make my husband do it. The man is not sure if he’s in the right terminal. He is scanning various boarding passes. He wants to get to Dublin, same as us. We bring him back into the queue. And he tells us his story. And later, I will try to piece it all together and my husband will fill in the rest. And I learn in no particular order that his wife died almost a year ago in Florida, that he has a condominium there, that he has been travelling. He wanted to find out more about his Irish ancestry and he did Cork and Belfast and Kerry, but he realised he had too much stuff, so he put two bags of warm clothes in storage. Now he needs to go back to collect them before he flies to Southampton to board the Queen Mary to the United States. He wants to be home for the first anniversary of his wife’s death. He lost her on 31 July. “That’s my birthday,” I say. He stopped taking all his medication. He went to see his GP and told him he would now be trusting the great physician in the sky. His wife’s name was Marilyn or Marilynne or Merilyn. I don’t ask him to spell it. They were married for 64 years. She was his world. He is originally from Minnesota. He taught his only daughter how to use WhatsApp. They FaceTime every morning. He has a note in his bag with details of his next of kin and what to do with his body if he doesn’t make it home. His screensaver is a picture of Jesus. He tells me he tasted great success, in business, in life, but his heart was cold. He fell out with his brother. When his wife died, something stirred in him, some insight, some deeper understanding. He contacted his brother, said he wanted to put things right. They recently reconciled. He visited every church in Rome. He did Pompeii, went for four days in a row, did a small bit each day. He is worried about America. Love is all that matters, he says. We reach the check-in desk, and he goes first. He is trying to get an earlier flight. Ours is at lunchtime. His is scheduled for late afternoon. It isn’t possible to change it. At least I tried, he says. I wish him well. I watch him leave. I feel like I have abandoned him.
I am reading The Second Mountain by David Brooks1. He has a column in the New York Times. I consider this success. His book is a variation on all the other books I’ve read about moving from the first to the second half of life, Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward, Sharon Blackie’s If Women Rose Rooted. Both describe the call that comes, often in midlife, the ‘is this it?” questioning, the increasing disillusionment, the absence of meaning, the realisation that there is something you must leave to find something else. There is a spiritual journey to go on, a pilgrimage. It involves much inner work, shedding the ego that is attached to what looks like the trappings of a successful life. It is painful. It is the death of the false self. Rohr talks about moving from order into disorder, Blackie about seeing the Wasteland for what it is, entering the Cauldron of Transformation. Rohr focuses on God and the Bible, Blackie on mythology and feminine folklore. Brooks uses the language of mountains.
“On the first mountain, we all have to perform certain life tasks: establish an identity, separate from our parents, cultivate our talents, build a secure ego, and try to make a mark in the world. People climbing the first mountain spend a lot of time thinking about reputation management. They are always keeping score. How do I measure up? Where do I rank?”.
“The goals on that first mountain are the normal goals that our culture endorses - to be a success, to be well thought of, to get invited into the right social circles, and to experience personal happiness. Then something happens. Some people get to the top of the mountain, taste success and find it … unsatisfying. “Is this all there is?” they wonder”.
I am not sure when I first realised there was a crack in my definition of success, that I had based it around tasks and reputation management and the goals that our meritocratic culture rewards. I realised I had to leave. Both Rohr and Blackie talk about the Fall, that disorientating period where we let go of what we once believed in, what we were once defined by. Brooks describes it as the valley of bewilderment. People in the valley have often been broken by something. For Brooks, it is a devastating divorce. For me, it is leaving a job. But it is not the leaving the job that breaks me, it is the leaving the identity that went with it. It is the increasing invisibility, the growing irrelevance, the network that disappears overnight.
“When you have nothing but your identity and job title to rest on, then you find yourself constantly comparing yourself to others. You are haunted by your conception of yourself”2.
It is taking me a long time to fully repair this crack in my definition of success, to stop comparing myself to everyone else, to stop making my worth about my achievements, to stop being haunted by myself.
I ask my husband if the man in the airport explained his religious experience. We agree he didn’t give any details, that maybe he didn’t have one specific Damascus moment, that all we saw was the evidence of his transformation. He had been split open by the death of his wife. He had seen something. He had emerged as someone else.
One morning, Brooks is getting off the subway in New York at rush hour. He is surrounded, as usual, by thousands of people, silent, sullen, trudging to work. Normally, he would feel like another ant leading a meaningless life in a meaningless universe. But something flips in him. Suddenly, he sees souls in all of them. He has a feeling that he is connected by radio waves to each of them. He regards them with a kind of reverence. He has a sensation of things clicking into place, that there is a flowing love that gives life its warmth, existence its meaning, that the universe is held in the cupped hands of God.
“This was not a religious conversion,” he says. “It wasn’t moving from one thing to another. It felt more like deeper understanding”.
You conquer your first mountain, says Brooks, but you are conquered by your second mountain. You surrender yourself. “That’s the crucial way to tell whether you are on your first or second mountain,” he says. “Where is your ultimate appeal? To self, or to something outside of self?”. Second mountain people have aligned their life towards some greater good, something bigger than themselves.
I’ve been thinking about the man in the airport all summer. I wonder if he made it home. I google but I can find no record of a Marilyn who died on 31 July 2023 in Florida, let alone the name of her husband. I still feel like I abandoned him, yet I don’t think he needed me to look after him. He was in much better hands than mine. I saw many wonderful sights in Italy in the summer of 2024, but I am imprinted with this conversation. I like to think one soul reached out and touched another.
The man I meet in the airport is 89 years old. He tells me his story of the second mountain.
Still Brooks!