How To Find Courage for self-discovery

I will have the privilege and gratitude to be celebrating a birthday in the next couple of days. When you start marking your birthday in decades then you know its gratitude time! I am well aware that I now have less time on earth than I have already spent and that’s a sobering fact to acknowledge.

However, there’s also something quite liberating about that realisation. Next year will be the big year that is traditionally celebrated so I will spend this birthday and the year leading up to it taking stock and contemplating how I want to go forward.

It’s really difficult not to be cynical or pessimistic about life as it stands now, simply because it’s hard to hear or see anything positive taking place all around, either in the news or even talking to friends and family. I have always lived my live as an optimist par excellence and cynicism, pessimism, negativism have always been the antithesis to my existence. However over the last few years I have found myself struggling to keep all those isms at bay for a variety of reasons.

I have come to the conclusion (which I think I have always known), that spending time worrying, aggrieved, upset and feeling sorry for myself etc is not only a dreadful waste of my valuable time but it is a sign of an ingrate; which is something I vowed not to be a long time ago.

Besides, as much as there are countless things to gripe about, I only have to blink again, open my eyes and see all the beauty and blessings I am surrounded by and with.

I have always taught my daughters that one does not stop learning till one closes one’s eyes finally. There is so much to learn about the world and the people around one and how or where one places oneself in that world. Even more important is the learning one makes about oneself which also shouldn’t stop till the end.  Sometimes we actually have to take a pause from our learned habits of mindless activity and tune into mindfulness.

Do not get me wrong when I say mindless activity, I am actually talking about all the endless activities we are involved in on a daily basis that we practically consider to be life or death. When in reality what we tend to overlook much to our peril, is the work we need to do on ourselves.

Think about it for a moment, how much do you really know about yourself? If you met a replica of you, would you be happy to be around that person or would you run mile? Sometimes we convince ourselves that our behaviour to others is out of our control, no matter how bad or devastating the impact is on that person. Many times we are on automatic at best or we actually have allowed ourselves to believe those isms I mentioned earlier which justify our bad behaviour.