HOW FAR ARE YOU FROM WHO YOU WANT TO BE?

Do you still recall the picture that you had in mind while you were growing up? If you were anything like me then you had everything planned out really early in life, you knew what you wanted to study, which profession you wanted to follow, when you would have your first child and be married and live happily ever after.

You soon find out that life has different plans for you, that the plan seldom comes together as you had hoped. They say life is what happens when you busy making other plans, while you busy starring into the sky, thinking up what makes the perfect life, life is happening and as it happens, you wake up to find that your life is far from how you thought it would turn out. The first reaction would be that of defeat, when you finally have so much on your plate that you believe your dreams do not matter anymore, you don't have the time, the money, the resources......So you convince yourself let go of all you grew up wanting for yourself, you feel that its not important anymore.

You rationalise with yourself that things turned out exactly as they should have, you belittle the things that you believed in back then so that they seem insignificant and in that way, you are able to live with not pursuing them. Not only the dreams and aspirations that we had, we also imagined the type of people that we wanted to be, how we wanted to relate to others and how we wanted to be remembered. Somewhere along the line, so much happens to us, good and bad but these become the experiences that shape us. Others may bring out the best in us while some events and circumstances seem to turn us into people we ourselves do not even recognise.

When you look in the mirror today, do you see someone that you are proud of? Or don't you recognise the person that stares back at you in the mirror..........we cannot deny that when life hurts or breaks us, we don't always know how to approach it, the lesson that we are meant to learn is not always received and embraced and instead of becoming better people, we become one of those people who have become cold and distant as a result of our experiences.

Ask yourself, how far are you from being the person that you want to be and if like me you find that you have deviated from your ideal, your principles and what you want to be known for, change it. Do not dwell on the flaws, do not get stuck in the past, do not look at how far you have travelled in the wrong direction. It is never too late to turn back, to give yourself a clean slate and be someone who stands tall, someone who embodies all the sweet things that your dreams were made of in the beginning. You can still be the person that you dreamt of, one whose dreams were not limited by reality, one who believed in innocence and purity, one who believed that they could be anything they put their minds to.