Young Bobby’s Super-sized Success Quest

     Young Bobby was an exceptionally thoughtful lad of just nine. But he was a bit on the lazy side. His primary aspiration was to get as much out of life as he could, with the least amount of effort. This is often called by adults, trying to have your cake and eat it too. Very few people do. But young Bobby, being a thoughtful boy full of zest and enthusiasm, had a plan. He dreamed up a candy store that sold secrets about how to achieve maximum happiness and success without much effort.

     So, without thinking about it any further, he got on his bicycle and rode to the now very real store on the corner of here and there. This particular store had 11 aisles. Half was marked as Happy and the other half was called Success. Both the Happy and Success halves of the store had 5 separate aisles each of different varieties of candy bars. The center aisle was marked “Whole.” Of course it too had a variety of different labeled candy bars with clues on being whole. The only trouble was that the candy bar wrappers on this center aisle were empty with somewhat odd names on them half which he later discovered he didn’t understand.

      All the different candy bars for the three sections of the store—Happy, Success and Whole—were packaged in very colorful wrappings that gave important clues on the sources of what you wanted out of the three main ones available. Bobby was amazed at such a fine collection of colorful candy to choose from, so being thoughtful, he took his time and looked over everything in the store one aisle at a time, very systematically as he usually was.

     He started down the first Aisle of Happy. Here all the candy bars were all about money and fortunes, mainly how much and what you needed to do to get the money. There was hard earned money, inheritances, lotto winnings, borrowed money and even stolen money. Of course he picked the candy bar that offered the most and cost the least. This was an imaginary inheritance he had dreamt up earlier. He had lugged along a large brown backpack to get all he thought he might need for his life journey, so there was plenty of room, at least for one candy bar from each aisle and room for more if he desired and the situation clearly called for that.

    The next aisle was full of happy candy bars marked family. Not to want to risk missing something valuable, Bobby grabbed two of these. Onto the next Happy Aisle, which had all the healthy candy bars that could bring good health. Thinking that eating all this candy might not be quite so healthy, he decided he better take 10 of these with varying degrees of good food, minimal substance abuse and maximum exercise. After all, everything was free in this dream store so why not take advantage!

     The fourth Happy aisle was full of love candy bar, all the way from lust to true love to unconditional love. Bobby wasn’t sure about these but decided the ones marked empathy and compassion looked interesting enough to try out when he got older. This took him to fifth aisle which had several different types of knowledge candy bars like facts, information, awareness, wisdom and even one about how to have your cake and eat it too. Since Bobby was a thinker, he took two handfuls of these knowledge candy bars to at least think about later.

     When Bobby approached the middle aisle he decided to skip this one and go to the Success side of the store. The empty candy wrappers kind of threw him off his game, so he thought he would leave these choices for later. He looked back a couple of times wondering, but proceeded on to the Success half of the store, even though his backpack was kind of getting a bit heavy just from getting all the Happy candy bars. 

     The first aisle of the Success half of the store was marked work. All the candy bars were all different kinds of jobs from teacher to grocery store clerk to professional athlete and all the way up to President of the United States, even including the CEO of the Universe (God). Since Bobby was young and virtually undecided as to what he wanted to do with his life and really didn’t have a purpose in mind, he grabbed everything in sight from this aisle nearly filling his backpack but not quite. That way he would have a lot of choices and opportunities for quite a while. After all, since your worked for over 1/3^rd of your life this had to be pretty important.

     The candy bars on the second aisle of Success were all labeled relationships. Not quite knowing what this really meant, he played it safe and took two just in case, marriage and friends. He picked up the pace a little since as you can easily imagine he was getting hungry seeing all this great candy literally everywhere. When he got to the third aisle, he saw some communication candy bars mixed in with interpersonal relations ones. This he knew about, from his parents, one being a child psychologist and the other a criminal psychiatrist. Naturally he took two of these for good luck, one of each. He knew he would need both just talking to his parents at dinner time.

     He resisted the tendency to want to eat one of the early money candy bars he picked up and instead continued on to the fourth aisle which was marked internal motivation. Not really understanding this, he carefully chose the candy bar with the most colorful wrapping as he thought he might figure this out later on in his journey with his bag of candy, which was now beginning to get very heavy on his small shoulders.

   When he got to the fifth aisle he decided to sit down and rest and think about things. Looking over at the next aisle he saw many things that didn’t mean that much to him like professional recognition, achievement, power, influence and such. After resting for nearly three minutes, he continued on to randomly grab two candy bars from this group, thinking he could figure out their worth to him as he went on his way.

     Now he comes back to the middle aisle to see what is so special here that lead to the “whole” designation. This middle aisle actually had the most interesting choices of all and he was hoping for plenty of room in his backpack for the final haul. There were many labels he didn’t understand but were intriguing never-the-less. Here candy bars were called things like spirituality, theology, philosophy, psychology, religion, communing with nature, reconciling opposites, living a good life, the whole truth, Zen, ethics, Sufism, Christianity, Muslim, meaning, purpose and many other words he couldn’t even pronounce. He secretly wondered how many people got totally lost here.

     This was the one stop shopping epicenter of the candy world. He just happened to have enough room for six of these, once he rearranged things.  So, he chose three he could read and three he couldn’t read and buried them in the backpack. So now he was ready for his journey to learn how to have his cake and eat it too. But he was getting very hungry and just had to have a money candy bar which happened to be marked as instant need gratification. Still being hungry he started on all the Happy candy bars, especially the ones marked something for nothing.

     Now supposed to be full of happiness, he needed to start on the healthy bars to restore his previous good feelings which had unexpectedly left him. At this point he had to go on a very long walk to try and walk away from happiness and find Success. Sometime later, as you would probably guess and after eating most of the Happy and Success candy bars, it was time to explore what this Whole things was all about.

     This took quite some time since this was not within the something for nothing game parameters. This was hard thinking work. Each empty candy bar wrapper from the Whole aisle that he had thoughtfully taken, each had a year’s worth of learning required without any nourishment except an internal sense of making progress. But even all the thinking didn’t help because you can really only learn something important like a principle or a truth by having a direct experience with it. Fortunately he had saved a few Happy and Success candy bars to fill in the gap between where he was and where he wanted to be.

     Where is Bobby now? He is an 85-year old man, mostly whole, happy and successful. Mostly is the key. There are still things he wants to do to increase his happiness, success and wholeness, but at least he has piece of mind and heart with a solid sense of making progress in his journey. The life lessons he learned worth passing onto the next traveler are these. It is best to be hopeful and positive in going through life to find and live your purpose to help and love others and not do any avoidable harm.

He could have been given those instructions at birth, but would he have followed them without having to eat all the happy, success and whole candy bars? Probably not. This wisdom is with us at birth, but it is hidden from us by the words we use to chase after it, always ending up with empty candy bags and wondering why.