What is Success anyway?


I've been thinking a lot about success lately. In the last year many of us have had just about everything we know turned upside down and we are being forced to take a new look at old assumptions. For example, what is success? How we define it has a lot to do with who we are. Definitions of success are as varied as snow flakes -- no two are alike. Commenting fondly on the human condition, my spiritual teacher once said that there are 6 billion religions in the world, one for each of us on this planet, (although we tend to believe that everyone should believe the way we do!) Similarly, there are as many individual definitions of success that spur us on to take action (or not).

Fortunately or unfortunately (depending on the results), there is a powerful cultural overlay defining success that pushes us in directions which may or may not be right for us. If we do not have a deep inner barometer of success defined by our own truth and measured by our own integrity, this cultural definition of success can lead us towards dissatisfaction and even dishonesty.

If we hold a well lit mirror up to our pop culture icons we will see our cultural malaise and disease reflected back in various degrees of severity, from anorexia, to teenage breast implants, to the Wall Street white collar thugs who ransacked our nation's wealth. Bernie Maddox probably thought that he was a very successful man. And so did just about everybody else.

Saturday, August 1, 2009

1500 Prison Inmates from Philippines perform Dangerous



This video is amazing to me. These guys are good dancers! All of them! I can't find anyone who is off beat or awkward. The main group in the black tshirts are better than good and the star guy is damn good. How did this happen? How did 1500 prisoners get enough time together in the prison yard to learn this choreography? Can you imagine 1500 American prisoners being allowed in the exercise yard at one time? I can't. Especially to dance to a song called Dangerous? ha!

And if by some stretch we thought that something like this could happen here, can you imagine that 1500 American prisoners would be as uniformly good dancers as these Philippino guys are? I can't.

So how did this happen? It turns out that DANCING is a big rehabilitation process in Philippine prisons. Can you imagine that here? "Hey, bubba, get down to the exercise yard and see how them prisoners are doin' learnin' that Dangerous dance."

I do know from having Philippine friends that dance and music are big big big in their culture. You'd be hard put to find someone who couldn't dance really well and also who didn't play an instrument and/or have a gorgeous voice. They have these wonderful mop/broom things that you wear on your feet and dance around in to clean the floor! and my friends taught me to do the clothes washing dance too, in the tub, kind of like stomping grapes. I mean, why not have fun and clean up at the same time?

So I guess it's not really such a surprise that dance is a part of their prison rehab program. And when things get us down, and we need a reminder to keep dancing on the path, we can just click on this little video and see these amazing dancing prisoners.
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