Creating A Life – Personal Discovery
June 13th, 2009
Somebody pasted on my Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/gettingstarted.php?) this message: “Sometimes we have to get lost to find ourselves.” Last week I was three fourths of the way in my blog post about Warren Buffet. After going over it countless of times, I decided against it. Why? Because the man never had to go through the process of finding himself. Even his second wife was arranged for by his first, who left him for no reason a lot of divorced couples have.
Inarguably the richest man in the world, his life, however, seems duller than the wallpaper of the only house he has – a 3-room affair he bought when he married more than 50 years ago.
If the article in Google is to be the basis, Mr. Buffet never seemed to have dodged boulders or kept his nose above water, like most mortals do, as we weave through the unpredictability, fickleness and ordeals of life; he never got lost to find his way to his billions of dollars.
What life is and isn’t:
George Bernard Shaw said that “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
As nice as this saying may be, unfortunately, a lot of us find, albeit a little too late, that what we have created is not what we wanted in the very first place.
The years following birth are essentially learning from parents and playmates. Our world is about games, toys and having fun. Then we start going to school and the fun is diluted with studies. As we progressed through our formal education, games become a little lesser, studies become more intense and demanding of our time.
We become euphoric when graduation day comes, only to find out that career-building looms ominously in the horizon. Career-building will soon be mixed with family-building transforming us all into acrobats – balancing everything we do. We have to balance our time between work, family, friends, socials, sports, etc. Balancing the budget is even more complicated that it saps the strength from most of us.
Then the education expenses stop, the children are through and gone. But before our sighs of relief find completion, the invasion of grandchildren begins.
So what have I created for myself?
I and probably 90% of humanity go through the cycle of life described above. On the average, I may have fared well. My children are through but not married, sparing me from the invasion of grandchildren just yet.
I went through very trying times that suicide was a tempting option. Probably out of cowardice or Divine Intervention, I squeaked through only to be clobbered by the death of my wife.
Now I am where I started – alone, weak and unknowing. My parents took care of me when I was young, now my children are helping me through. Though I have had much in life, some good, mostly bad, I never thought the day will come when I would envy to see old couples, hand in hand, go by.
Never too late to create ourselves:
The other day was especially trying. I was alone at home, like most times, and slowly felt the onset of emptiness, of loneliness, of melancholia; of having no purpose in life. Fighting them off lest depression will be on me again, I closed my eyes and typed a phrase in Google’s word search. Then I surfed for the subject to find out how populated the Internet is with it.
There are no less than 13 million pages about “Personal Discovery.” The upside is that we all can make it “personal,” making it new, novel and special. We all can “create” ourselves through our own personal discoveries. Discoveries to satisfy our bodies, our minds, and our souls, making each day of the remainder of our lives a series of “Sunrises.”
And we should not tarry. Time is not on our side when we really begin to create ourselves for ourselves
