When you feel like you have everything and nothing...
I find myself sitting here reflecting as a string of, well you could call them slaps in the face... have come to me in the last few days, and I find myself reflecting on everything I have in my life, and also at how I thought I would be in a very different position at 38 - aka married, 2.5 kids, a dog and the white picket fence... Kiwi dream right?!?!
Last night a string of photos from our final year at high school started popping up on Facebook and oh boy oh boy they were good... reminding us just how 'stylish', how innocent, naive, bold, and how we had the world at our feet no matter what our dreams and ambitions.
Then, on the weekend in a quaint bookstore in the Blue Mountains, with an owner who was so passionate and it felt like she knew everything about all books in that store, I picked up a book called Take Courage - Anne Bronte and the Art of Life. Now my normal books are suspense or business, so to pick up a book that is a memoir of Samantha Ellis through her investigation into the forgotten Bronte sister, was for me, different, and before I knew it I was into the second chapter in a very short space of time.
“... Maybe because I’m a year off turning forty, and single, and not a parent ... I’ve recently started to think about what mark I might make, what I might leave behind...”
I identified with Samatha's stage in life and this got me hooked... now I am engrossed in learning about Anne Bronte and the lessons she has for us in her short 29 years on this earth, in her last letter, Anne wrote:
“I long to do some good in the world ... before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for future practise - humble and limited indeed - but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose.”
To read these words from someone who wrote them only 5 weeks before she died in 1849, and to see that even back then people had the same drive we have now, to be on purpose, make a difference and leave this world and those who meet us in a better place, to pass that legacy onto others and see them take it further than we could have.
Now, that legacy, purpose, mission, is going to be different for all of us. It could be local or globally driven, it could be raising a family or a corporation, at the end of the day what we choose to do is our choice the main thing is making that choice, following that dream and ensuring that we live a life with no regrets.
This world is ever changing and it seems faster and faster nowadays, so finding our purpose and ensuring we are rocking that on a daily basis in whatever form it takes for us, this is what is important.
As the All Blacks say 'to leave the jersey in a better place', we need to pass that torch on and then we can sit as I am tonight and look at everything, feel content, happy, or restless depending on what stage of the mission we are at. That then asks the question, what is it to have everything or to have nothing and whose expectations are we working to, our own or societies?
Now, these are my ramblings, agree or disagree, I'm putting them on 'paper' in this live blog and hopefully, it jogs my brain and also others.
Till next time xx
