How do you define success?

Dragon Fruit Time. From my Raw Alice photoshoot. Photograph by Dawn Langley.

It’s New Year’s Eve.

It’s a time of year where we reflect on what has passed and plan our ‘want to’ list for the year ahead ...a time for consciously or unconsciously 'measuring up'.

At a time of year where we can feel pressured to measure up, I am reminded that success can be measured in different ways.

When the actor Ralph Fiennes was asked on what it felt like to have success, I think it was just after his Oscar nomination for the English Patient, this was his reply.

"The people I consider successful are so because of how they handle their responsibilities to other people, how they approach the future, people who have a full sense of the value of their life and what they want to do with it.

I call people successful not because they have money or their business is doing well but because, as human beings, they have a fully developed sense of being alive and engaged in a lifetime task of collaboration with other human beings -- their mothers and fathers, their family, their friends, their loved ones, the friends who are dying, the friends who are being born.

Success.. is all about being able to extend love to people... not in a big, capital letter sense but in the everyday. Little by little, task by task, gesture by gesture, word by word."

I like this definition. It feels more relevant after this year than ever. 

Thank you for staying with me, writing to me and making my recipes. I really couldn’t do it without you - and I wouldn't want to.

Happy New Year and I hope it’s wonderful for you.

Deliciously yours,

Deborah