Feel like you've missed the bus?

Life is like a journey and we are all headed somewhere at every point in time. Several buses, different bus stops, different bus routes. The journey starts the moment you are born and ends the moment you leave this world. At some point, whether you realise it or not, you get off at a bus stop and take another bus to connect you with your final destination. If you are a careful traveler, you'd most likely have planned your journey, so you know exactly where to disembark and take another bus to continue your journey to your final destination. If not, your guess is as good as mine.

Now I'm sure you are wondering "What bus is he talking about?, What journey? What bus stops?" This is what I mean; I believe strongly that every person on earth has a purpose to fulifll and knowing this purpose determines what kind of bus you get into. No two people have exactly the same destiny. We are all designed to fulfill different missions.

We all have expectations for our lives, our definition of success; where we want to be, what we want to achieve, our success measures... how far or close are you from your dreams? Are you where you expect to be? or where you'd planned to be? does it seem like the whole world has run along and left you behind? Do you feel like you are at the bottom of the rung in terms of life success? Do you feel like you are on the wrong bus?

Sometimes when we feel this way, it is usually because we compare themselves with our peers or other people who have "arrived". However, it's pertinent to understand that we all have different assignments on earth, and to fulfill our assignments, we must have certain experiences. Any wonder why it took you so long to graduate? get that first job? find your spouse? succeed on that business?

You sit and wonder.. why does "A" have everything going well for herself, and I can barely keep my head up? how come "B" has got the perfect job when I even had better grades than he did? I must be a failure because "C" has everything made and I can barely keep my head up. Thinking this way will never help. We need to constantly keep our eyes on what we know God has planned for us, and not focus on others, using them as our yardstick of personal success. Yes, we are all on a journey but nothing says we have the same arrival time.

Some of us tend to think "I could have been a success but I never had the opportunity. I wasn't born into the right family or I didn't have the money to go to the best school". But when we measure success by the extent we are using what we've received, it eliminates that frustration..... Fred Smith

My level of success is not based on another's yardstick but on the measure God has set for me. What am I here for? what am I supposed to do with my life?

Find your destination, alight at the relevant bus stops, and fight the temptation to get down at someone else's stop. Don't compete with others in the journey of life, understand what you have to do on earth and then compete with yourself. Life is lived only once, don't live someone else's script.....

Starting Afresh....

Whilst doing some work on my computer, power went out. Unfortunately, my UPS had some problems and I had forgotten to save, so I lost the document. You can imagine how I felt; after so much brain work, taking so much pain to ensure I was producing good quality work, then I lose it because I didn’t save. Of course I had to begin again, and this time, saving every five minutes.

Though I wasn’t able to reproduce exactly what I’d done before the power went out, I had the opportunity to start afresh. This new lease on life meant that I could even produce far better than I’d done before. Was there any point assuming that what I was working on before was the best I could churn out? Why, no way!

This experience reminds me of how we never really get the opportunity to right the wrongs in our past. Once you’ve done it, you’ve done it, and it’s recorded in history. You can make amends but you can never change the situation to the exact way it was before. Most often, a lot of people concentrate on changing the past when the future beckons, fresh and untouched, waiting to be filled with even better memories. Looking back always without focusing ahead never got anyone far in life.

We look back at the past and wonder why we ever did some of the things that we did. We wonder why we “messed up” and went against all conventions to fulfil our hearts desires, even though we knew in our deepest parts that we were wrong. You ask yourself “what exactly was I thinking? How could I have been so dumb to have ever done this/ said that?” You fill your mind with thoughts of what should have happened instead of what did happen.

At those times, do you sometimes just wish you could start life all over again? Get another chance to rectify the things you aren’t quite proud of in your past; failures, indiscretions; begin anew? wipe the slate clean and get rid of all the unpleasant memories et al that you may have gathered along your walk through life? erase all the old unpleasant memories that lurk deep within your soul? I know I sometimes do but I’m learning to realise that it’s just a waste of time. The reality of life is that we can never really bring the past back in turn. Once we've experienced a certain time, we can't go back again to relive it. Once 17.59, 20th January 2007 is over, it's over! You will never experience that time frame again; it's saved in the annals of history, etched in your sub conscious.

But then we still wish, don’t we? And why might that be? Probably because of the way we are “wired”. Comfort thinking I call it; revelling in your thoughts; wishing, hoping, maybe even justifying the action, even though you know that doesn’t really change anything. You focus on the past and nothing comes out of it. Whilst this may not be really bad, focusing solely on the past is not good at all.

It’s important to look back once in a while to chart a better course for the future. Retracing our steps helps us prepare for tomorrow but we must never remain in our past because it can become the greatest enemy of your future.

Tomorrow is waiting; untouched, unclaimed. Move ahead, make amends where necessary, learn the lessons from the past and make these the building blocks of your tomorrow. Realise that you really can start afresh; not by reclaiming the lost moments but by using the experience to build a better future.

I don't have a choice

How many times have you ever said this to yourself or to someone else and actually believed it?

Many times when we are faced with challenges, we convince ourselves (overtly or covertly) that we don't have a choice, so we go with the easy way out. You cheat a bit, you tell a "white lie", you take a quick decision, and then you convince yourself there was no other way out.

In reality however, life always offers us many choices but the truth is we always want the choices that favour us. If we are faced with unfavourable choices, we immediately convince ourselves that we never even had a choice in the first place!

I think it has to do with being very honest with ones' self. Will I go the easy way and say to myself that I never had a choice or will I go the hard and unpopular way and admit that choices still exist and then choose to make that hard choice?

It's up to you to be true to yourself and make informed decisions every time!