RECOGNIZING OUR JOURNEY AS A WAY OF MOVING FORWARD
I hope this meets you well.
While we are growing, we tend to let external factors determine our drive and our abilities. We are hurt from the things that people say about us and we feel pain from life circumstances. It’s easy for someone to tell us not to let people’s opinions or thoughts affect us. But there is no denying that in everyone’s life, pain and people’s opinions are inevitable. However, living and glowing through it is what we should desire.
There is no denying the fact that life circumstances are draining, coupled with anger and frustration while losing sight of the good days becoming slowly miniature. It’s easy to think that life is against us when we are not satisfied with our lives and the circumstances that we go through everyday.
This year, I had a resolution. I wanted to cultivate good and new relationships and most importantly learn about myself and understand my life. In the beginning of the year it was just a resolution and so I would occasionally find myself pondering on how I would go about it. I knew my life wasn’t perfect. I knew there were a lot of blemishes I had to tend to. We all know how difficult and frustrating it is to care for blemishes. It takes time, effort, consistency and most importantly patience. And these attributes take the same attributes and ease to cultivate.
While I was practising gratitude, I realised I was grateful for everything except my journey. I didn’t even know it was something to think about. How would I be really grateful if I didn’t include my journey? A thought that randomly popped into my head while I was folding my clothes. I sat down for a second and thought deep about it. My journey? Do I like my journey? I mean I know how my life has been, I am literally the only person that really understands my life. My ups and downs, all the fun and the mistakes I’ve made, my most embarrassing moments and my most heartbreaking moments. I knew where I came from, where I was coming from, where I wanted so much to be, where I belonged and where I didn’t. I pondered and I had that thought in my head for a whole week. I had it in my head until it clicked.
It’s easy for us to want what others have, a complete family, a home, money, the nicest clothes, the nicest shoes, the nicest cars, a job, everything we ever wish for. It’s easy to want what is missing in our lives because that’s what we do, we desire what we don’t have. We work hard for what we don’t have, we let what we don’t have hurt us and consume us until we feel like our lives aren’t good enough. The reality is that in everyone’s life, there is something that they do not have and they long for. We all have a longing. That’s where businesses flourish from. That is the foundation of industrialization.
Business owners carry out research in order to constantly improve their products so they can meet users’ needs and keep them coming. Every business has something different to offer that its other competitors don’t have. Just like in every person’s journey there is something in your life you lack that someone else, maybe your friend doesn’t lack. There is no one person that has a life filled with everything they want. Which is why most of the time, people keep chasing things that they think will fill up the missing gap without actually figuring out what the gap is.
If you are a Christian, you are familiar with the word of God made man. The famous story of Jesus. Jesus was human, he wasn’t born in a wealthy family, his dad was a carpenter. His parents had to run from one city to the other to prevent him from being killed, he wasn’t liked by everyone either, he also suffered from rejection but he knew his journey and so he accepted it, he knew that however it played out he had a mission on earth and he never derailed or let anything else drift him away from accepting his journey. He accepted it and so he flourished in it.
I’ve had conversations with people who have wished they could do this and do that and I would wish I could do this and do that or wish I had this or had that as well. After this beautiful epiphany, I came to the realisation that I had to accept all the things I didn’t have in my life at the moment. I had to accept that this was the journey I had to go through to become me. I hated it and I cried about it. I wanted it to be different, I wanted to ask God why . Regardless of whether we ask God why or not, it’s exactly how it would still remain after the why.
I sat down and I wrote down everything I lacked and I wish I had, literally everything. Everything I felt like if I had right now I’ll feel fulfilled. I wrote it all down and I said to myself “ well, this is the gap” . It felt like I was reading those self improvement books where the author would say “look at yourself and love you and all the parts of you that you see and can’t change, love them too”. That’s exactly how I felt. It wasn’t just about loving my body, it was really about loving everything about myself. The flaws, the gaps, the challenges and the pains and most of all giving myself a break. I am also human. I needed to just realise that the only difference between my imagined role model, which is my future self, is that she has accepted her journey and so she made it work for herself.
Understanding that this was my journey helped me to understand that it was valid for me not to have gotten it right this long and now that I have I can finally move on. Move on knowing that this is my journey and there is nothing I could do about it at the moment and that there is also absolutely nothing wrong with it. I could either accept it and just continue with my life or not. Or not isn’t an option for me. This is the part I just found myself in. A part I did not choose or have control over and I am not about to beat myself up about it. The only way I could move on and understand why my circumstances, people and life was the way it was, I had to just understand my journey.
Life isn’t perfect, everyone is human. We shouldn’t expect things to be exactly how we wish they were, even a Genie is restricted to 3 wishes per person.
Hope you enjoyed this read. Thank you for stopping by, please leave some claps
XOXO
Our journey is ours.
We owe our generation a good life.
