Becoming the Person You Were Meant To Be

"When I was a young writer, I was talking to an old painter one day about how he came to paint his canvases. He said that he never knew what the completed picture would look like, but he could usually see one quadrant. So he'd make a stab at capturing what he saw on the canvas of his mind, and when it turned out not to be even remotely what he'd imagined, he'd paint it over with white. And each time he figured out what the painting wasn't, he was one step closer to finding out what it was.

You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren't. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don't think your way into becoming yourself."
-Anne Lamott

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I really love the above passage from the article Becoming the Person You Were Meant to Be: Where to Start by Anne Lamott.  I really appreciate the idea carried through the article that understanding what you don't want for yourself is almost if not just as important as determining what you do want for your life.  Sometimes I think that concept is not always fully given its due.  Making mistakes and figuring out what you don't want is not merely part of life - but important life lessons that should be embraced, for they allow you to get one step closer to becoming yourself.

As Lamott states - "Here's how I became myself: mess, failure, mistakes, disappointments, and extensive reading; limbo, indecision, setbacks, public embarrassment, and endless conversations with my best women friends; the loss of people without whom I could not live, the loss of pets that left me reeling, dizzying betrayals but much greater loyalty, and overall, choosing as my motto William Blake's line that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love."



I could not have said it better myself!