The Nature of Fulfillment

Initially when faced with the proposition of fulfillment we would look towards goals and targets, success and possibly fame. It’s easy to think that these things would bring us happiness. It’s a social myth that money and success are the bringers of fulfillment and perhaps rightly so, for if the drive within us is not to make of ourselves what we could then society itself is likely to degenerate into a lethargic state of stillness.

So is this belief so misinformed? Well it’s advisable to now look towards those who have acheived fame and fortune as a measure of the fulfillment that can be gleaned from success. A quick glance at the newspapers will usually provide a fairly accurate picture of the sheer number of celebrities resorting to recreational drugs and alcohol as a way of relieving the stress of success. It’s fairly difficult to imagine many celebrities so far pushed that they resort to mind damaging drugs for a sense of elated happiness to view themselves as fulfilled people. Surely the nature of fulfillment must be something more developed and more complex then simple glory.

For Julius Caesar, one of the most powerful men of all time, conqueror of Gaul and Rome, was reported many a time as an aged man lost in the past, until some external stimulus could give him direction again. A great man, possibly the greatest, lived life unfulfilled. How could anyone possibly believe that the mere completion of goals and acheivement of dreams is a source of lasting happiness? When such great men died miserable and alone. Was it Caesar’s enemies that dragged him down? Or was it those that he lost? Or maybe it’s just that he succeeded himself.

Socrates was a truly great man also. To quote Michael Eyquem; “He raised nothing, but rather brought down, reduced, and subjected all strength, obstacles, and difficulties to his own and proper natural level…Under so humble a form we should never have recognised the nobility and splendour of is admirable ideas.”

Socrates lived life at a fast pace, but at all and every time it was his own. He had control of his life as he controlled the pace of it. He was a man that exceeded himself, despite everything he was one of the greatest men. Yet he died a man so peacefully at rest, it rarely questioned the state of his fulfillment, “for those whom to live is to think” he was a man above all others, successful and fulfilled. The pinnacle of man back in the infancy of mankind.

Socially we are led to belief that the nature of fulfillment is success, but historically we could conclude that succeeding oneself is a path to a life lived distraught. There is perhaps a middle ground to be found, to exceed yourself, but not to succeed oneself. That a man of great capacity has the ability to be great and to be happy, but the shallow built man has only capacity to be great or fulfilled. A lesson not to be taken too literally perhaps.

Sources:

The essays of Michael Eyquem, seignevr de Montagne

Caesar by Christian Meier