Purifying the soul

When you are young, you have dreams of what you want to be when you grow up. Be it a rock star, an actor, a doctor, an astronaut, a footballer or a plumber (money is supposed to be good in plumbing). But as we grow up, things tend to happen where you just kind of lose your direction and end up doing something that isn't even related to what you wanted to do in the first place. Not to everyone-just most people. Why would this be? Probably because you slowly start realising how difficult it is to achieve those dreams and then that's when life can start getting to you.

There is always someone-at least someone who will always tell you that what you're doing is wrong. In my case, it was most of my family, the careers teacher in school and random strangers that couldn't care less about their own lives nevermind someone elses'.

When I left school, all I wanted to do was play my guitar. I applied for the music course at the closest college there was to me. They rejected me as I was so bad on the guitar-I didn't even know what I was doing when I auditioned, I just thought, "I have a guitar, I'll get through". I ended up doing a BTEC 1st course in which I did Drama, Music and Dance-I couldn't dance to save my life and ended up avoiding as many of those classes as I could. Drama wise, I realised that I happened to be very good at it and later chose it as my main course figuring that I could always play my guitar at home and also hated the theory side of music. I stayed in college for 5 years, knowing that once I left, I would get a "normal" job and didn't want my ambitions of becoming an actor/musician fade. Also, as much as the people doing Performing Arts annoyed me, I still had a little respect for most them in some ways. The fact that they were performing artists-not just regular working stiffs that were just doing any jobs they could get-yet. Even though it is really difficult to get a job these days with the way the current economy is, when you do get a job, it is really easy to get used to it and go from one job to the next, plodding along. They had ambitions like me too and I suppose that is one thing I could connect with at the time-but in every other way, I really disliked most of them. They were all so needlessly loud and annoying. I suppose the majority of Performing Arts students would be wouldn't they??

Anyway, it seems the older most people get, the less enthusiastic about life they also get. You can almost physically see the soul being drained from some people as the days go by. I am going to try and tell you that this shouldn't be the case.

First of all, I don't agree with the saying "Life begins at 40". It really doesn't. It begins the second you were born. You're not in control of it at first of course, but as you grow up, you begin to make decisions in your life. A lot of them will be wrong and this is a good thing as it is all part of a learning experience. The only thing I find people (including myself) doing is making the same mistakes.

Also, I find that people end up getting into relationships. Whether they really like the person or not, it is something to do with their lives. Sometimes people just kid themselves that the person they are with is the one. Forgetting that they haven't even met 99.9 % of the population. There is a whole world out there to explore.

I suppose that every decision you make is related to how you have lived your life, your upbringing and the way you are currently feeling. For example, some people don't know why they are racist. They will just hate others and not know why. But I think that it must be deeper than that and that maybe they had a bad experience or read/heard that somebody else had a bad experience of that particular race/colour/creed and maybe subconsciously they keep that stored for the rest of their lives. Might sound a bit crazy but it could be a possibility but this can all change.

A lot of people seem to spend their lives moaning about how they want to change certain aspect of their lives or moaning about their partners, jobs etc but not many people actually do something about it to change it all. So why moan?

Do things to make your life better. Your life is in your hands, the decisions you make now don't have to be related to the past in any way.

Inspire people. Be inspired yourself.