MOVING FORWARD

Most of us would like to feel we are moving forward as we move through life. In the past few years, life has been compared to a journey. This implies movement and by implication forward movement.

Possibly there is something within us that wants to, and possibly needs to, see some progress, some change, and also reassurance of one sort or another that we are ‘getting somewhere’, moving forward, progressing, accomplishing something.

It isn’t that we are all impatient and driven, but more that our lives need milestones and events with which we celebrate and encourage ourselves that we are ‘on the right track’ and going in the right direction.

We accept that ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’, in other words that everything will not be done in a day and that achieving some worthwhile goal, requires time. We eventually understand that life requires learning both patience and perseverance.

Sometimes we are stalled, we are delayed, we encounter obstacles. Some of these are beyond our control. When this is the case, we learn ways to work with them, go through them or better still, go around them.

Some obstacles are of our own making. These come from within us and reveal our reservations and fears of the unknown. With these we learn that we need to work on ourselves in order to move behind the ways we hold ourselves back. When we do we are often surprised how much easier it is to move forward when you are not sabotaging ourselves.

Ideally, we would leap frog over anything that gets in our way and soon feel we had moved forward again. In real life, however, sometimes we need to delay and defer some things until we are able to learn enough and educate ourselves, particularly when specialized training is necessary.

Sometimes we seem to be an impatient lot. Some of us have come to want something and want it now. We have learned to tolerate, accept, and more incredibly still, to excuse our own impatience, and that of others.

Sometimes we sugar coat aggressive behaviour and call it drive and motivation. While this sometimes enables some people to achieve their goals, despite the cost to everyone else, some of today’s manifestations are not very attractive, logical, considerate or actually not anything other than selfish and stupid.

The life well lived, on the other hand, has to take into account that living well requires a certain amount of restraint, patience, and consideration of others. Each of us needs to recognize our skills and aptitudes in order to effectively employ the resources we have available.

A willingness to learn something new about ourselves, and often the world around us every day, is probably one of the best tools each of us has available. Ultimately, as someone said recently, there aren’t many shortcuts in life, it requires you to live it.

By the time we can stop and look back, we realize that, so far, we have usually experienced more than we expected to and had a lot of surprises and adventures along the way.