“Everyone thinks of changing the world but no one thinks of changing himself.” Leo Tolstoy

Your life is about gently starting over…

Your life will be a series of inhales and exhales, I do not  mean how your body consumes oxygen and expresses carbon. What I mean is that becoming yourself is a series of building and undoing, trying and failing,learning,unlearning and relearning, showing up and sometimes turning away .

When we do not know how to gently start over, then we do not know how to live. Nobody was meant for one path. Do not put yourself in a box. It’s only how we respond to the moment, how we adapt, how we inch closer to our truest selves that we ever start to feel as though we know why we are here.

I hope that you learn how to gently start over. I hope that you learn to look at yourself and know that you are not quite the person you want to be, without condemning the person you currently are. I hope you learn how to see your evolution not as a linear ascent into perfection, but an unpacking of why you might want to perfect yourself in the first place. What feels so broken? And who taught you it was that way?

I hope that you allow your life to be bigger and greater than you ever thought it could be. I hope that you will allow yourself to embody more beauty than you ever believed possible. I hope you do not get cornered in the small stories, the small ideas that you had about what the future may be.

I hope that you do not crave for the things that you have outgrown just because they are familiar and easy.  I hope that you do not consider everything you lose to be a loss. I hope that you do not define yourself by the limits of what you have known. 

I hope you do not cover your potential at what other people say is possible and not possible. Most of all, I hope you acknowledge the light when it hits you. I hope that you let yourself do more than you ever thought you could.

I hope that you learn success is less about vision than it is consistency, because ideas are easy and everyone has them. It is what you act on consistently that you truly see the viability of it. It is what you do all of the time that you learn to grow around and through. You are not supposed to get it all right the first time.

We fail but get back at it. You are just supposed to keep trying until you do. You have unlimited potential and I hope you do not forget it.

I hope you learn that loving is much like life. It takes everything and gives everything back. And merging your life with someone else is the greatest honour you will ever get. I hope that you learn to compromise, not to take, and how to appreciate, not assume.

I hope you learn that you are also your own project, your own muse, your own love affair. I hope you learn you belong to yourself. I hope you learn you belong to yourself. I hope you learn that you are not meant to grow once and never again but to fall in love with the process of building and pulling apart and rebuilding again.

Life calls us to shed ourselves at different points in time. There is nothing we can do to avoid this. No religion, no belief, no accretion of belonging that possibly removes this requirement from us. We are not here to be just one person, nor a series of ourselves piled up upon one another, fighting for relevance and space.

Instead of holding tightly to that which gives you peace and a sense of belonging, I hope you learn that growing is really just learning to love what you have while you have it. Be where you are while you are there and not get too frustrated at the fact that you are still a work in progress. 

There is no point at which you are supposed to be completed. The only finish point is death. Your life is about gently starting over, every day, every hour in ways  both impalpable and unquiet, beautiful and uncheerful starting and expected.

I hope you learn to softly dust yourself off and begin again, because life is too short to stay undynamic, life is full to only drink a quarter of the glass.I hope you give yourself permission to want what you really want. I hope you write out your story with a plot twist in the third act. I hope you are both responsible and unreasonable all at once.

I hope you have the bravery to leap and the persuasiveness to build yourself into a wholly new life. I  hope you have the courage to actually choose yourself and I hope that the clarity to know it is what you were meant for all along.