This question has been sitting with me lately. When it comes to a project or initiative we are launching, we often know the outcome. When we turn this question toward our own lives, it is something we often cannot answer.

The question lingers with us in the background and creeps in when things slow down. As we look to a new year. When an event happens that changes the trajectory of our lives. When we lose someone we love. Or simply as we get older.

We talk a lot about success in our culture. We chase it, measure it, and compare it to others. But rarely do we pause to ask who gets to define it.

Years ago I put an article   “Lessons from Five Centenarians,” inside my journal. It is a collection of reflections from people who had lived long enough to see what truly matters in life.

Their lessons were simple:

• When you play Scrabble, do not use up your S’s too quickly.
• Volunteer and serve your community. It gets you out of your own worries.
• Be kind.
• More is not necessarily better.
• No one is ever too old to love.
• If you worry too much about being old, you will be old.
• You will always need your girlfriends.

These say more about a life well lived than most of what we define as accomplishments.

The book Life Is a Verb sits on my bookshelf with yellow sticky notes jutting out of it, marking small pieces of wisdom about living and how often we put it off, waiting for life to begin. Waiting for the next promotion. Waiting to begin an exercise routine to get healthy. Waiting until a season passes. Waiting to pay off debt. Waiting to go on that trip when the children reach a certain age.

But here is the thing:

Life does not wait.

There is always some obstacle we need to climb over or something unfinished we need to tend to. Those things are not interruptions to life. They are life. Waiting for the perfect moment to begin living means we are missing the only moment we have.

Yet we measure our progress against someone else’s timeline. We question our choices because they look different. We carry the weight of our past or live in the future, forgetting to be present in the life we are living now.

We do not need to have every answer before we begin. We can sit with and in the questions, with the not knowing of what comes next, and allow something to emerge.

Mother Teresa encouraged us to do small things with great love. Yet how often do we overlook the small things because we are busy chasing the big ones.

A moment of kindness, a courageous conversation, or a small step toward something that matters to us.

We don’t need the whole path mapped out to move forward. Sometimes, it’s the small steps, taken bird by bird, as I like to say, and guided by our own definition of success, that make all the difference.

The Bowl of Cheerios

I watched Oprah Winfrey in the afternoons while on maternity leave with my daughter. I remember a woman who was dying of cancer sharing her story with Oprah. Her story stayed with me because she was about my age at the time. In her final months, she recorded videotaped messages for her young children. She left behind wisdom about living, about falling in love, doing laundry, writing thank-you notes, and navigating both the big and small things life throws at us.

She and her husband took their children to Disney World during her final months to create bountiful and joyful memories together.

After she died, Oprah invited the family back on to her show. Oprah assumed the children would talk about the Disney trip. the happiness place on earth as the saying goes. Instead, when she asked them about their favorite memory of their mother, the little girl paused and said quietly:

“I remember once when my mom asked me to get her a bowl of Cheerios and we ate them together on the bed.”

It was this small moment of eating cheerios together her daughter remembered.

I will never forgot that. It made me realize how rarely success looks the way we expect it to. How often it lives in the smallest moments we do not notice, yet those are the ones remembered long after we are gone. They are how others experience us. It is why when my father battled cancer this past year I reminded myself just sitting beside him on his bed drinking coffee together in the mornings or watching the news or his favorite movies in the afternoons is what mattered. And sometimes just being present together in the silence was enough. Those are the moments I cherish and I remember now that he has passed.

In many ways, this is why I write: to leave behind stories that linger with me, to remind myself of what truly matters, and to reflect on what success means in my life. Then, I intentionally try to live towards that life.

How do you define success in your life?

Are you making room for it in the life you are living now?