Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.

Nothing about my birth - or yours - was random or accidental. I was born for this time - and so were you. We were each chosen for a particular, cosmically important task that can be done by no one else.

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be,

We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be.

We all create the person we become by our choices as we go through life. In a very real sense, by the time we are adult, we are the sum total of the choices we have made.

We are formed by what we do. It is our actions that ultimately make us. What we do slowly, slowly becomes the creator of our lives and our souls. What we are doing in life decides how we are creating ourselves. What our behavior is in life decides the directions our soul will travel, the paths it will move on, the new worlds it will explore.

Most of us are not raised to actively encounter our destiny. We may not know that we have one. As children, we are seldom told we have a place in life that is uniquely ours alone. Instead, we are encouraged to believe that our life should somehow fulfill the expectations of others, that we will (or should) find our satisfactions as they have found theirs. Rather than being taugh to ask ourselves who we are, we are schooled to ask others. We are, in effect, trained to listen to others' versions of ourselves. We are brought up in our life as told to us by someone else! When we survey our lives, seeking to fulfill our creativity, we often see we had a dream that went glimmering because we believed, and those around us believed, that the dream was beyond our reach. Many of us would have been, or at least might have been, done, tried something, if...
If we had known who we really were.

WE ALL create the person we become by our choices as we go through life.

Each person comes into this world with a specific destiny - he or she has something to fulfill, some message that has to be delivered, some work that has to be completed. You are not here accidentally - you are here meaningfully. There is a purpose behind you. The whole intends to do something through you.

We are not meant to be just like anyone else.

Our brains are so conditioned through education, through religion, to think we are separate entities with separate souls and so on. We are not individuals at all. We are the result of thousands of years of human experience, human endeavor and struggle.

We are not what happened to us,
we are what we wish to become.

WE ALL create the person we become by our choices as we go through life. In a very real sense, by the time we are adult, we are the sum total of the choices we have made. This is not pleasant hearing for the person who wishes to place the responsibility for what he has become on someone else or on that blanket alibi, circumstances beyond his control. To such a person the circumstances always seem to be beyond his control. But I believe most firmly that in the long run every single one of us must be responsible for himself and for his actions.

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?