Who Are You and What Do You Want?

As another birthday approaches at the end of this month, I begin the process of taking inventory of the past year. Looking back and evaluating my “year at a glance” daily planner for appointments, progress, events, trips, relationships, celebrations, challenges, and of course, where and with whom I have spent my time, it becomes clear who I have become and what I have welcomed into my life in the past year. 
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It’s not complicated to look at our lives objectively and begin to see the patterns in which we schedule our time and become who we are and move toward what we truly want.  Beginning with our morning routines as simple as exercising, eating, listening to or reading the news or not, do we decide to greet the day or instead regret the day? Anticipating the workday, are we happy and satisfied in our environment and the people we work with, or do we feel a sense of frustration. I hope not. Every birthday reminds us how quickly life moves through us. 

At a Stanford University commencement speech, the late Steve Jobs, CEO and co-founder of Apple and Pixar, urged the graduates to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life’s setbacks…. including death itself. He talked about the questions that he asked himself every morning for 33 years: “If today were the last day of the rest of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? And whenever the answers were ‘no’ for too many days, I knew I had to change something. Your time is limited. Don’t waste your time living someone else’s life."

Who we are is what we think about ourselves in our thinking time. What we desire to have in our lives is how we decide to spend our time imagining, creating and wanting more. Wanting more is the process for learning and growing for our future time.

How about happiness in who we are? In his research on happiness, Shawn Achor, author, Harvard professor on human potential, asks the question: "How happy can we be? Why are some people happier than others? What makes the difference between one person to another? How happy can we truly be? The answer is simple; Happiness is experienced not by what happens in the world, but happiness is how your brain processes the world.”

Again, the answers are obvious; we have only one choice in order to understand who we are, what we want, and how happy we want to be. Capture the current time, and add time to our days and weeks, by choosing to be who we are in this very moment. 
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Enjoy your time………. it’s who we are and what we have. 
Love,
Hilda