Reflections

Hello! Hello! Hello!

I was looking at the goals I set out for myself at the beginning of the year. 2012 was supposed to be my greatest year yet. To a certain extent it has been a fabulous year. I got the privilege to travel to Scotland and present my work at a conference there. I found a good work rhythm and my work is going great finally. It has also been a really difficult year, I came so close to throwing in the towel with my PhD. I thought I just wasn't cut out for it because I was not getting anything right. I kept missing deadlines time and again. It felt like I had gone way too deep than I could handle and I was drowning.  Like I told you in my other post what goes in will come out, I had to make changes in the way I was doing things. I decided to read and follow academic blogs and that has made all the difference. I have found a community of other people studying similarly to me and we share resources which is really great.


There is one good lesson to take from all of this.It is never too late to make changes. Life is not about getting it right the first time. We are all works in progress and the people that look like they got it all under control, well they certainly do have something under control. They do not have all of life figured out, I don't believe so. So we cannot say they have it all under control. So what do they have under control, well I think they have figured out the stuff that is worth sweating over and the stuff that is not. So they don't beat themselves up over missing the mark or getting something wrong. Instead they know that they are not perfect but that imperfection doesn't mean there is some deficiency in them only that it they are human. So they have figured out that they will sometimes miss the mark but thats just lessons and they can get back on the horse and ride on to win the war.

So I started off this year and this blog with great goals and hopes. And I guess this post is an update of sorts. When I started off, I put so much pressure on myself that I was going to write in this blog perpetually, that was the idea I had in my head as a measure of the success of this blog. I thought I would write here forever and if I stopped that would mean I had failed. I have come to realize that just like relationships, some things are just for a season and serve their purpose for that time and you have to let them go. I am not thinking about stopping this blog, not right now anyway but I have a different perspective about it now. For as long as I can I will write something because I love to write and this is one way I get to write for an audience. That said, I am open to change and open to seeing things differently. If  I have to, I will change.

I think thats a good way to think about and look at our lives. Sometimes we are stuck with dead weight of things that are no longer working but because it was effective at some point we continue lugging it around. There is the famous statement "change is the only constant in our lives" but rarely do we take time to reflect and become active agents of change in our own lives. Let me challenge you today to reflect on your life. Any dead weight that you need to throw out? Any methods you need to change? Sometimes all it takes is a change in the way we think. Sometimes its changing relationships or just taking a different route to work.