Success?

How do you define success?

Let’s say you do something by accident, you didn’t mean to do it but it worked out anyway, that can be a success too, right?

You can spend weeks planning a project and have no one show up. You can organize a meeting to help people make some money- something that people always profess to want or need; and no one shows up.

This is all kind of frustrating. But this can mean one of many things. Among them are: something came up and the person was legitimately busy and couldn’t come (why they didn’t call is a mystery), they forgot (also possible though forgetting something like that in less than 24 hours is hard to believe), they’re not interested and this is a way of expressing that, and so on and so forth. But because your job is a facilitator you say no problem, if you still want to do it let’s reschedule. And because you’re a representative of the United States you can’t show anger, or annoyance, or anything like that.

Now you go about dealing with the frustrations.

Since there are no pools here (or beaches) I’ve been running daily. It helps a bit with the frustrations of people not showing up or just anything.

While I was running these kids showed up, and started running with me. So we ran, and we ran, and we ran some more. The kids sat down and took breaks but since I was running in circles anyway (I found a 400 meter circle so it’s like running on a track), they were able to rest, catch up, and then repeat the cycle. The kids then started emulating the push ups, crunches, and pull ups I was doing too so we did that together. And then, we discussed the importance of hygiene and such. So something totally unplanned, turned into an educational experience.

So how can something with no planning whatsoever, be more “successful” than something I sat down and actually planned?

Then it started raining and the kids disappeared, but it was nice while it lasted. I’m sure once everything is done being planted they’ll come back though.