What If You Changed Your Idea of What Truly Matters?
What have I to prove, and to whom, and why? I am keen enough to want nothing more than to live a simple, humble, unfettered life.” — Donna Lynn Hope
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking that my life hasn’t amounted to much. I never got the advanced degree I had hoped to get. I have never been to Europe. I haven’t had a stellar career. It’s been a pretty ordinary life, made up of ordinary things.
Society tells us that the important things are the achievements of education, career, and making enough money to secure a comfortable future. Throw in fame and wealth and now you have a life worth living.
I can tell you right now if that is the measure of a meaningful life, I’ve missed the mark. But if I haven’t accomplished the things I had hoped, have I wasted my life? Have I exchanged my dreams for a humdrum life?
At the end of my life, I want to feel like I lived well, not squandering my one chance to create a life of meaning. Since I can’t fulfill all my dreams or live up to society’s idea of a life that matters, maybe it’s time I give myself permission to live my life just as it is, with nothing to prove and no measure but my own of what constitutes a meaningful life.
What if the life I am living now is it? What if I never achieve what I had hoped to achieve…
