Fear of success paralyzes me in mid-step,

the thought that I might have to be on call to promote myself at any given moment or that I might have to give up my precious free-and-easy life-style. My life is running in reverse. At my age most men are starting to think about retirement, and getting desperate if they don’t have a nest egg already in the works. Many here in Thailand already are retired or semi-retired, a bar owner or something like that. That’s what I did when I was in my twenties, diddled and fiddled at this and that. Now I’m a reformed workaholic, still in therapy, trying to start a third career. Still true success is elusive, always just around the next corner. Maybe it’s better that way, like a karate kick going through a board rather than merely striking the surface. Maybe success is something better looked back on, than forward to, except as a call to action. Once you have to repeat your success on demand, then you start wondering what true success really is. You’re only as good as your latest work, or so say the pundits. They say lots of things. That’s rather myopic, I’d say, given that sometimes the times have to catch up to the work rather than vice versa. At the very least self-conscious expectations pretend to produce uniformity, not good work.

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