RESOLUTIONS

It's almost that time of the year when people will be making resolutions and vowing to do this and that and change one thing or the other in the New Year. For the longest time I was one of those people, who always had a long list of things I wanted to do and change in the new year. I don't subscribe to the idea of resolutions anymore.

Simply because time has taught me that any change that you want to make is not tied to the beginning of a new year. Every day you wake up, you are availed another chance, a clean slate so to speak and with that comes the choice to do what you want. To know that the minute you realise you have been travelling the wrong route, you can change. You don't have to wait for January the 1st to change the things you don't like.

Truth is I think more than waiting for the clock to strike midnight on the 31st of December, we need to work on changing our thoughts. Is it the Bible that says "as a man thinks so he is," it doesn't matter how long that list of resolutions is, if you go into the new year with the same thoughts that you had this year, chances are you will produce the same results. So rather than waiting on the new year make a decision to regularly reflect on your life and the direction that it is going and if you spot anything that you don't like, evaluate your thoughts and how they may be influencing your results. When you find a correlation, make the needed changes upstairs before you even think of what action to take.

By all means have goals but instead of that list of resolutions you usually make. List what you want to achieve, how you are going to do it and assign a time frame to those goals. More importantly work on your thoughts and get rid of any self-limiting talk that goes on in your head. When you believe you can achieve it and see the victory in your mind, that list you compile will serve as motivation for you and not just something that fizzles out by March of the new year. ALL THE BEST WITH 2015. Make it count. Make it a turning point.

WHAT DO YOU STAND FOR?

Our teen years are usually categorised by a lot of learning and confusion and trying to find our direction in life. One of the things that stands out during this time is our need for peer acceptance, breaking away from our parents and finally being able to make our own decisions. Decisions that don't even turn out to be our own because we are so hell bent on trying to win the approval and validation of our peers. With your late twenties comes a shift in focus and finally coming to a place where you know who you are and what it is you want from life.

Unfortunately the transition is not natural for all of us and it's sad to watch grown people still not knowing what it is that they stand for, their decisions are still based on trying to be accepted and loved by those they regard as important. The problem with trying to live a life that is centred around pleasing everyone around you but yourself is that, you never win because no matter what you do there will always be a few people who don't approve and therefore don't accept you on the basis of the choices you have made. Not only that but it's rather tiring trying to always think of the next person before you take any action in your life. I am by no means saying we should blindly do things without considering how they may impact others but sometimes being selfish is a good thing especially when no one is getting hurt as a result of you putting yourself first.

The people we gain by pretending to be who we aren't are not even worth having in your life because the right people will always love you for the right reasons. That means they can look passed your flaws and differences and embrace the person that you are. There must be things that you believe in, things that you stand for and while those things may not always win you the approval of everyone or even popularity, it should be enough for you just knowing that you are true to yourself.

Not everyone will understand or love you and it's not even your job to make them change their minds about what they think. I am of the belief that when you stick to who you are and what you believe in, the right doors will open and the right people will naturally gravitate towards you. Effortless and definitely a win-win situation in my eyes. Life is so much simpler when you don't feel the need to hide your true self and when you can be as crazy and silly as you want around people and know that they don't love you any less or think differently about you.

There is a popular saying that, "if you don't stand for anything you will fall for everything." That's how you find yourself going in whichever direction the wind is blowing and your no means yes and yes means no. Don't fall victim to seeking approval of the people you love so much so that you don't know who you are outside of that acceptance. Seek to know who you are and what you stand for and trust the Universe to bring people along your path who will not only understand that but share the same sentiments as well. Also learn that differences are inevitable and it doesn't mean either one of us has to change to fit what the other thinks is ideal but that we can learn to co-exist and still love each other the same even if we don't see everything through the same lense. Cultivate your own thoughts and beliefs by not accepting everything at face value and when you have come to learn that which you stand for,  don't try and impose it on everyone else. Stand for something or risk falling for what everyone else stands for.

WHEN YOU HAVEN'T HEALED

I attended a Conference for women and teens the other day, it's something that one of the guest speakers said that brought this specific piece to light for me. You know those moments when you listening to someone speak and it lights a bulb in your head and heart and brings to the fore something you didn't necessarily not know before but they say it in such a way that it forces you to look at your life and face things you may have swept under the carpet.

How many of us are walking around broken and bruised and don't even realise it? Something happened in your life and you put on a brave face and convinced yourself that it didn't matter and then something that someone said revealed to you that you hadn't healed. I think so many of us are preoccupied with not falling apart that anything that vaguely tries to bring unbalance in our lives is ignored. We never let the wounds of what happened heal themselves in a natural way instead we try and speed up the process by numbing ourselves. We all have different crutches that we use,  for some it's alcohol, ensuring that we are so busy we never have time to think about our hurts or just plainly refuse to acknowledge that we are in pain.

So we go on about the day, pretending not to have a care in the world. We almost succeed at playing it cool and showing the world that we have it all under control. Until something very minor happens and sets us off on a downward spiral into the depth of depression. What happens when you haven't healed? You live a superficial life, one where you playing a role that's not a true reflection of all that is burning inside of you. You have answers to anything and everything but never to the troubles that make you toss and turn at night, in public you are the epitome of strength and yet in private you barely know your left from right.  You haven't healed.

You took what was bothering you and put on a band aid and turned the other way in the hope that the wound will go away all by itself. But it doesn't. It may appear to be gone for a short period but I guarantee you that anything you have not dealt with will one way or the other find its way to the surface again. What happens when you haven't healed.

Just as physically the body is able to heal itself, we need to allow our emotional scars the time to go through the healing process in a natural way. That means not rushing the process and trying to pretend that what hurt you didn't. I am in no way saying that one should wallow in self pity and give in to their circumstances but know that healing is a process and the time frame for all of us is different. It's okay to admit when you have not healed and to realise that,  trying to fake it will only delay the process. Embrace your hurt and how it makes you feel, give yourself time and when you have gone through the motions, you can truly move on without looking back. When you haven't healed, you deny yourself the opportunity to live a full life and when you are walking around bruised and broken, you risk hurting others you come across. Only when we have dealt with our pain and allowed time to heal us can we give ourselves the best and ultimately those we interact with too.

LESSONS LEARNT

A friend and I went out for dinner the other way. We hadnt seen each other for a while so naturally the conversation was about updating each other on what has been happening in our lives.  The joys and struggles and how we have felt about both. In the middle of the chat I said these words, "don't you sometimes wish we could turn back the clock and make different choices but I suppose we would still make the same mistakes even if we could because we would still not have learned all we know today."

In that brief moment I found myself at peace with everything that has happened in life and how things turned out. For the first time in a long time, I wasn't beating myself up for the wrong choices I had made but instead realised that there was no way things could have been different.  I am only a better person today because of everything I had gone through. The mistakes were lessons learnt, lessons I wouldn't have otherwise acquired.

I think a lot of times we blame ourselves for the mistakes we made and always wish we could be given a chance to go back in time and correct them but fail to realise that this is how we grow and learn in life. Going back doesn't guarantee that we will make wiser decisions or be able to avoid the flaws of the past. We can only learn what we know through reflection and that sadly means that what happened had to happen so we can be the people that we are today.

Only when we stop regretting the bad maze we had to go through can we truly embrace the lessons that we have been taught and do better because we now know better. As cliché as it sounds it holds so much truth, we can't change the past but can use what we know now to influence the present and therefore change the future. Don't dwell on the mistakes for too long but only look at them long enough to see what the lesson is in the experience, what you can take from it and what you can do better next time. In that way your mistakes will always be your stepping stone, propelling you to the next level and phase of your life.

When you have done that, you can look back with gratitude at how things have panned out and how you have grown from your bad experiences.

FIND YOUR OWN TRUTH

I have aspirations of being a motivational speaker, a writer who puts words down that make an impact on someone else's life but I don't aim to make what I say the universal truth. I write and speak what is truth for me and hope that it will resonate with someone out there.  Yet I do not in any way want to make my experiences and what I know the only truth there is.

I use social networks quite a lot to put my message across and well to generally vent about this and that which I observe. At the same time I love to read about other people's thoughts and experiences and use what they share to learn. We can never claim to know it all and even in trying to hold on to what we believe is truth, we should still be open minded and adaptable enough to leave some room for learning from others. But I have just this one thing that nags me.

People who believe their truth is the gospel and that there is only one way of looking at things and that is their way. Social networks have opened the door for us to take in a lot of information but at the same time, the information we receive can be misleading and quite honestly biased. I have a problem with people taking their personal experiences and making them universal, because something happened a certain way for you, it automatically means it will happen the same way for others. That is misleading.

My experiences and feelings may be similar to that of the next person but can they ever be completely the same? We may have the same experience but the dynamics that lead to it will surely differ and so will what we take from the experience. It would be a misrepresentation to put across what I know as the only way there is. People read books about someone's experience or observation and immediately turn that into their mini bible that dictates what they do and the choices they make. They listen to speakers and famous people relate their stories and that suddenly becomes the only angle from which they view life.  That is flawed.

I think it's important that while being open to other views, we still make an effort to search for our own truth. What someone else has done and gone through can't be a reliable foundation on which you base your life and future decisions. While I am all for the idea of people sharing their struggles and stories of triumph, that should not be the only lens which we use to view life. Human beings are too complex to box into a one size fits all idea of what life is.  Our backgrounds, history and experiences differ and therefore we differ too.

Amidst the vast sources of information at our disposal, how we live and what we do should still be based on what we know personally and what we have seen work in our lives. We all have our methods and ultimately all want to get to a place where we are at peace and living out our purpose. Even success is not universal, for one it might be a mansion on the hills and for another it may be simply living with content.  What we call success will depend on who we are and what we deem important in life, one person's method can't be the only way.

We should all strive to find the perfect balance between learning from others while still maintaining who we are and what makes us unique. No person, I don't care how successful has the formula to life. We do what we can with what we have and hope for the best. Find your own truth, that which works for you. It need not match with what society says as long as at the end of it all, it brings you to what makes you complete and happy and feeling like you have conquered.

SIMPLE PLEASURES

I was on a work trip the other day and finally got to ride on the Gautrain. My excitement was on another level, I was like a child in a toy store. I took pictures of every moment and made sure that I had proof of my crowning moment. It may seem silly to most but it was in enjoying this for all it was that I realised something: Life is not the grand moments that we wait for in our lives but the simple things that we overlook in our daily lives

So many of us spend our years in a trance-like state waiting on big moments to whisk us away and sweep us off our feet. In living that way we miss the everyday moments that seem insignificant that have the power to ignite in us pure joy. It's the simple moments like riding on a train, hearing from a friend, passing an exam, managing to wake up and exercise when we said we would, it's waking up in the morning and still having breath in our bodies. These are these moments in life that we have reduced to mundane that should be giving us the joy we seek.

Yet often we wait on grand gestures, we tell ourselves that the occasion needs to be big before we celebrate it. In an effort to wait on those moments, we risk looking back one day and realising that we missed all that life was. If you are waiting around for the moments you want, you will miss those ones that you have that are just as worthy of a celebration as the "big ones"

I was recently telling a friend and sister who has just quit her job to start a business to embrace the process and to celebrate each step accomplished in the process. The celebration needs not wait till the business is up and running and making money to be celebrated. Finally quitting the job, coming up with a name, getting registered etc those are the small moments she should pat herself on the back for reaching. If the main focus is the end result, she will totally miss the small moments in the journey that should have also brought joy in her life.

Life is not only about the finished product, it's not in finally having the title you dream of or the bank balance that affords you what you desire but it is about the journey getting there. It's about the falls and gains, it's about what you do wrong and get right, it's about finding joy in the mundane and ordinary. It's about allowing yourself to feel each and every moment of your journey and learning to celebrate not just the milestones but the simple pleasures hidden in every day that God gives you.

LIVE

Most of us are comfortable with what we know, we trust what we are familiar with and that is what makes embracing change so hard. We want to be in control and be able to maintain it at all costs. When things change we go into a frenzy because it forces us to forge into the unknown. Where we feel helpless and despondent because with change comes the loss of what is comfortable and familiar. Change is the only constant they say which means it's the only thing we can be guaranteed to always be present in our lives.

Some changes are self-imposed, we consciously seek them while some changes occur without our input and those are the ones we struggle with the most. When what we want to hold on to slips our fingers and life as we know it becomes a distant memory. When suddenly all you knew to be true becomes a lie and you look at your life and don't even know how you got there. Then instead of embracing the changes that are, you want to do everything in your power to go back to how it used to be.

Life shows us the perfect example of change in the 4 seasons that we experience every year.  The summer days that we enjoy, the autumn when all is brown and dull and the leaves fall, the winter that has us hiding in our homes trying to keep warm which eventually paves the way for spring when flowers bloom and life becomes the beauty we know it to be.  What all this teaches us is that each season has its characteristics and each one makes way for the next season. No matter how hot it gets, you are assured of the cooling that comes with autumn and no matter how cold it gets in winter, you know that spring will make its way again.

Change is like those 4 seasons of life, with each change paving the way to your next phase of life. There is little you can do to speed up the process, little you can do to stop to the changes. Your only option is in embracing the change and holding on till the next phase if the one you are in now is the not a desirable phase. When times are good you know that bad is always lurking around waiting to make its entrance, the same way when things are bad you should know that good is waiting to honour you with its presence.

Without change we are simply standing still, rotating around the same areas of our lives without growth. Times need to change so that we grow, we need to lose ourselves in the chaos of what is in order to find ourselves or recreate ourselves. Change is an opportunity to learn, about who we are and about life. Change is an opportunity to see beyond what is comfortable and familiar. When you are trying to hold on to what you know, you never learn about all that you can be and all that life can offer. And sometimes when the initial storm of change has passed, you learn to see life with a complete set of new eyes. And maybe even see that what you were content with wasn't even a fraction of what you could have.

Because we are not always brave enough to make changes, life will sometimes impose them on us. It's in those moments when you feel lost and confused that you should make the decision to live. To trust that a greater Being exists in the Universe, who is always working things out for your good. It's in fearlessly forging into the unknown that you discover all that life could be. Something you will never experience by holding on to only what you know and fighting against change. Life can only be lived by being flexible and by sometimes allow the winds of change to lead you where God wants you to be.