Finding out who you are...revised.

       When presented with an obstacle, we can find out a lot about ourselves. Whether its dealing with the suffering in a race, a life disappointment, or even failure. I like to say that what defines my character is how I act when things are going well, however I'm starting to realize that the reality is the exact opposite.

               Just like that quote from middle school-- "Life is 10% what happens to us and 90% of how we react to it", (err...something like that) we show our true colors in the face of adversity. It has a lot to do with perspective; how you categorize a situation in your mind. Sometimes even the most minor mishap can balloon to a catastrophe if you choose it to be so. To the same tune, a huge roadblock can become even taller if you panic about how to get around it. We seem most inclined to take the path of least resistance, which in most cases is allowing that negativity to get the better of us.
       
Okay, so I'm about to do something really weird with this post.

      I was sifting through the multiple (scatterbrained) blog drafts that I have, and when I came across this one it stopped me in my tracks. I really like this pair of paragraphs, but there's something wrong, particularly with the first one. You can tell that I truly believed that I was defined by my occasional meltdowns...which was not too far from the truth at the time. I think I wrote this in November 2011, which was in the midst of one of my roughest semesters. Such a paradigm was not uncommon for me at the time. I can tell that if I had finished this blog, it would probably be a 500 word paradox. I would have tried to sort out my situation, arriving at the conclusion that I simply had a faulty outlook on life and that there was nothing that I could do about it. I had clearly lost my rose colored glasses. It's taken me about a year and a half, but I found them again.
       There's no reason to believe that life is anything other than beautiful. Even if it's a beautiful mess, it's still beautiful. When you start to look at the world as something that keeps going round rather than something that stands still at times, it gives you a new perspective. As aforementioned, how we categorize events in our minds affects our outlook and attitude. Attitude is ours to own and to protect.
      I had always believed (and told others) that people can change if they are willing and have the right environment. Sure, it sounded nice in my blog, but I realized that there is some intangible factor that must be added in. If I could tell you what it is, I would. It's a combination of the concrete and abstract;the product of other people, feelings, long thought trains, situations. Somewhere along the way I had a "life: you're doing it wrong" moment. I'm far from perfect (aren't we all?) and that's exactly how I want it.


Life isn't success.
Life isn't a GPA or test score.
Life isn't a race.
Life isn't proficiency.

Life is doing the things that you couldn't live without with the people that you couldn't live without.

PS: There was nothing too terribly wrong about what I wrote. But there was something wrong with the standpoint in which I was writing. I don't often publish emotional drafts, but when I do, I edit them first ;)