One Slip of Paper

 

I wanna be the best in at least one thing in this life.

~ Toba Beta

We stack up years of life experience, thousands of dollars in education, numerous career moves, and we still wonder what we will be when we grow up.   It all gets rather confusing as we need to address all parts of our selves ... family, career, spiritual, physical, and mental.  We have many sides to our human form and our focus can become quite skewed in our attempt at wholeness.   It is ironic that the most important part of the equation for living a full life is discovered so much later in life. 

Think of it as trying to build a bicycle without directions.  We can make several test trials, errors, rebuilds, and experience very few moments of pleasure before it all falls apart.  When we have finally come close to giving up, the owner's manual arrives.  Just browsing through the directions, we easily understand what we were trying to do was ineffective.   The instructions help us to see our task from a different perspective.  Then we begin to build once again.

If we indeed came with an owner's manual, perhaps we would speed read, or skip pages, or misplace the book.  Maybe we would seek out the 'cliff notes' version and miss the importance of trial by error.  We would compare our mannual to others and become so overwhelmed with conflicting information we might end up a jack of all trades, and master of none.

In my heart, I don't think we would ever be born with an owner's manual.  At best, we would be born with one slip of paper with one message delicately scrawled across it.  It would read:   Be the best version of you!