Success Is A Sunflower by Madsyn

Success Is A Sunflower by Madsyn - February 2021 Scholarship Essay

My freshman year of college, I visited the art museums in Washington DC, USA in the summertime. I was awestruck by the amassing of human talent hung on the walls around me. I turned a corner and saw original Vincent Van Gough paintings. I burst into tears.
The Oxford dictionary defines success as “the accomplishment of an aim or purpose”. Like Oxford’s definition, I concede that my successes have indeed come in the accomplishment of an aim or purpose. I have aimed to get top grades and succeeded. I aimed to learn a second language and succeeded. I aimed to work as a professor’s teaching assistant and succeeded. But I would qualify these things as lower successes. They brought me immediate satisfaction and pride, but not joy. My greatest successes are those that chase happiness. They are often by accident or forced upon me. Like happening upon a stranger in emotional distress and comforting them, while guiding them to get the professional medical help they need. By being confronted with my sister’s attempted suicicde and having to act in the moment to hold the family together. By finding peace in a view on a hike when I am lost in the Utah desert. By feeling love and wonder while wandering in an art museum.
The rigid goals connoting excellence and success that I have pursued in my college career that connote excellence like having top grades or being bilingual were more painful experiences than my accidental successes that were focused on chasing happiness, balance, and peace. Success is abstract. It is a feeling of goodness with a complicated composition of rough and fine brush strokes mixing and swirling and stacking bright and dark colors. It is not a checklist of traits or landmark events in a person’s life. It is a winding path of growth that travels towards a state of happiness. Some people’s paths cross through countless melancholy starry nights before they feel they finally find a vibrant scene of sunflowers. Some people, like Vincent, for whatever reason feel that they never find their sunflowers. Perhaps we all need to redefine our success frames to allow for more sunflower searching. My most precious successes are moments of restoring peace or removing pain from my own life or from someone else’s physical and emotional experience. Success is happiness. Success is a sunflower.