This week saw me turn 29yrs and 4 months old. That leaves exactly 8 months til the big 3-0. Not that I am stressed or worried about it or anything. Much. Ok, well a little bit. As we travel through our lives we are often too busy to stop, look and reflect on our goals and dreams. So when a big birthday comes along it makes us stop, look around and take stock of what we have. It can also be a time where we look at what we haven’t achieved.
During our teens the world is our oyster and the options laid out ahead of us are endless. The idea we can have it all is freely exploited and there is an expectation that we will take it. Careers, marriage, children, university and travel are just a few of the options that we can choose from. Or why not attempt all of them, but in what order? Which do you focus on? How do you find time to fit them in? As a career advisor, with the best intentions I’m sure, tries to encourage our 16 year old self’s to pick a job for the rest of our lives it become a lots of pressure. The person we are at 16 is totally different to the person we are at 30 or 40 or 50. The best advice, which has stayed with me, was to just do what you enjoy doing. This is great but often there is so much! For each option we choose, to some extend we sacrifice another. If we opt for university and a high flying career, do we put relationships, marriage and children on a back burner? Or if we choose marriage and children are we putting our career on hold? Can we juggle child care with studying and career progression? The choices are endless, overwhelming and often, to an extent, out of our control. But what happens when we reach a milestone age and we haven’t achieved some of the things we wanted to do? As women there is a certain time pressure to having children, but the reality and responsibility of finding the right man means it doesn’t always happen when you want it to. And if you are lucky enough to find Mr Right, to have his babies and live happily ever after, how do you carry on in a job you love and have worked so hard for when you will want to spend all your time with your gorgeous little one? Can we really have our cake and eat it? At what point do we accept what we have, celebrate our successes on the way and just keep working towards our future dreams? And at what point do we cut ourselves some slack, accept that some things that we wanted aren’t going to happen (maybe because they are not meant to be) and reset the Sat Nav of live? There were lots of things that I wanted once upon a time; to be a size zero and six foot tall; to travel the world in a caravanette with my best friend; to hear that Brad had got back with Jen (Team Jen all the way!); be an air hostess and to have hair that was thick and glossy, like in a L’oreal advert. None of these things have come to pass, but I have survived. In fact I have made it my mission to thrive, safe in the knowledge that I will never be the girl with the perfect hair, I will not grow past the five ft 4 inches I have been for over 10 years and I am a bit to claustrophobic to be travelling anywhere in a caravanette! So as we approach mile stone ages, we can aim for three goals. One – To be able to look back at the past, proud of what has already achieved. Two – To accept that the achievements of our past have bought us to the present and that the present is the spring board to our future. Three – The future is ours to plan and make what we want of it. Age may dictate some things to us such as when we can have children or what job we do but no matter how old we are we are never too old to dream and set new goals.
No comments:
Post a Comment