Musings on how we perceive our life journey
I remember the first time I navigated the London transport system by myself. I went on holiday and I was fortunate enough to have one of my cousins, who was free at the time, to show me around. I think we went out almost every day for the first week and by the end of that week, she went back to Paris where she was living at the time.
Well, I didn’t spend all that money to travel and sit down at home so by the next week, I was itching to discover the city by myself. It was such a delight to know that one could stand at the bus stop and a bus would arrive at the exact time it was advertised for. If the bus didn’t come, the estimated arrival time would be provided. I couldn’t help thinking about me standing at Oshodi, waiting for a bus to Obalende!
One night, I went out with some friends and we were out pretty late. I took the train heading back to my cousins and fell asleep, missing my stop, and arriving at the final station. It was the last train ride for the day. The only way back was to take the night bus, so I went to the bus stop, and as I got there, the bus heading my way was leaving. Even if I had run for my life, I wouldn’t have been able to make it. I felt so sad: I’d fallen asleep and missed my train stop and now, I’d just missed the bus by a whisker. I probably had to wait for about 30 minutes or so before the next bus arrived.
That experience got me thinking about how life is like a journey and we are all headed somewhere at every point in time. Several buses, different bus stops, different bus routes. The journey starts the moment you are born and ends the moment you leave this world. At some point, whether you realise it or not, you get off at a bus stop and take another bus to connect you with your next destination. If you are a careful traveller, you’d most likely have planned your journey, so you know exactly where to disembark and take another bus to continue your journey to your next destination. If not, your guess is as good as mine. However, sometimes no matter how well we plan our journey, life happens. The bus is delayed for whatever reason we cannot control or perhaps we experience something that makes us alter our well laid out plans. We could have estimated how long it would take to arrive at our destination and then, life happens.
2023 is almost over. Wasn’t it just yesterday we were celebrating the end of 2022 and ringing in the New Year? Time does fly quickly, doesn’t it? One minute you’re making New Year resolutions or setting goals for the year and the next minute, you’re looking at the plans you set for this year and wondering why it seems you haven’t crossed off so many things.
You take a look at the people in your circle and you wonder why everyone seems to have experienced winning moments this year but you’ve barely scratched the surface. You remember all of the hurdles and challenges you faced as you also recall how everything seemed like a breeze for someone else. Do they have two heads? What did they do that you didn’t do? Those are just some of the questions you ask yourself as you’re tempted to feel like you’ve failed. You saw the bus at the bus station but every time you ran towards it, you always seemed to be late. You probably feel like you’ve spent more time waiting for the bus than you have spent on the actual bus. And when you did get on the bus, it seemed like the journey would go on and on without ending.
Now I’m sure you are wondering “What bus is he talking about?, What journey? What bus stops?” We all have expectations for our lives and different definitions of success: where we want to be, what we want to achieve, our success measures… We constantly think about how far or close we are to our dreams. Are you where you expect to be? or where you’d planned to be? Does it seem like the whole world has left you behind? Do you feel like you are at the bottom of the rung in terms of life success? Do you feel like you are on the wrong bus?
Sometimes when we feel this way, it is usually because we compare ourselves with people we know or other people who have “arrived”. We see the people we consider our peers and we believe we have not achieved significant success. However, it’s pertinent to understand that we all have different assignments on earth and to fulfil our assignments, we must have specific personal experiences. Any wonder why the path you have taken in life is different from anyone else’s?
You sit and wonder… why does “A” have everything going well for herself, and I can barely keep my head up. How come “B” has got the perfect job when I even had better grades than he did? I must be a failure because “C” has everything made and I can barely survive. Thinking this way will never help as we are measuring ourselves against other people’s yardsticks. Of course, we will come up short, we didn’t set the standard. We need to constantly keep our eyes on our plans and not focus on others, using them as our measure of personal success. Yes, we are all on a journey but we are in different buses heading to different locations, nothing says that we all have to arrive at the same time.
Some of us tend to think “I could have been a success but I never had the opportunity. I wasn’t born into the right family or I didn’t have the money to go to the best school”. But when we measure success by the extent we are using what we’ve received, it eliminates that frustration….. Fred Smith.
As we count down to 2024, we should reflect on this year. What worked? What didn’t work? Why? Take a step back and appraise your performance against the goals and plans you set. Find your destination, alight at the relevant bus stops, and fight the temptation to get down at someone else’s stop. Don’t compete with others in the journey of life, understand what you have to do on earth and then compete with yourself. Life is lived only once, don’t live in someone else’s script. This is the way I see things today.