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There will always be a better person than each one of us and this truth we must accept. Someone will always run faster, climb faster, and reach their goals earlier than the rest.  But this is not a valid excuse not to reach the destination we have set for ourselves. If others made it, there’s no reason why we can’t.

The achievement of others should serve as an encouragement, inspiration and motivation for all of us to move on. But if for some reasons, we failed to join the finishers at the finish line, don’t despair.

I believe that life is not a race but a journey. It is not a matter of who finishes first. It is not even a matter of whether you finished your own race or not. At the end of the day, it is not really so much about who is good, better or best, particularly if you make others fall just to win. They say that it is lonely to be at the top.  But should it be?

Since life is not a race but a journey, we have to make a good difference in the lives of those people who travel with us. Life is meaningful because we helped others succeed, not if we make others fail to achieve our own success. The success of a person is measured, not when he tells other people that he did, but when other people say he does.

Making a good difference in the lives of others means taking care of those people who are with us in our journey. In the process, we also let these people to take care of us. We don’t feel envious or the angst when others succeed because we know in our hearts that we are a part of that success.  In the same vein, other people feel good of our success because they know that they are part of it. And there is no reason to be lonely at the top in either case.

If we have to treat life then as a race, let it be a contest of how we can make others succeed.

Heroes and champions are never born, they are made — by the unsung heroes and the unknown champions who lived and traveled with them in the course of their lives because they too felt that their heroes and champions also took care of them along the way.

Making a good difference in the lives of others also means making a good difference in our own life.

Life’s journey starts with a dream. As they say, it’s the only thing that is free nowadays. And there’s actually no limit to what we want to dream about.

To realize a dream, most people find the need to device a plan or a strategy, consisting of short-term or even long-term goals or activities. Others would go about their dreams by just leaving things to fate but this is the surer path to lose in life by default. Dreams would have better chances of fruition when we consciously and actively pursue them through our actions. But regardless of our individual preference, our dreams always set the expectation of our journey.

Our expectations fail because of our failure to act, or maybe because we took the wrong path when we are called upon to make our choices. For some, the experience is bitter. For others, the experience is a misery, if not a tragedy. But others would just rise to the occasion and take up failure simply as a challenge to do more and better.

Our expectations also fail because of circumstances beyond our control, or maybe because we are not gifted with the talents to make our expectations work. Oftentimes, unforeseen events make us helpless or even discourage us from moving on in our journey. Human limitations as reason for failed expectations though is more apparent than real and have become a convenient excuse for failing. This world is replete with individuals who were born to fail because of their innate physical disabilities but nevertheless conquered their own dreams that normal human beings would find extremely difficult to do.

Whatever is the real reason for our failed expectations, I believe that the most important thing is to give and do our best all the time in the pursuit of our dreams. In the end, when our expectations are not met, we can ask ‘what happened?’ or ‘why it happened?’ if only to learn, or for other travelers to learn, from our mistakes and our frustrating experience. 

But when the bad weather comes to pass, the most difficult and critical part of the process is acceptance. How we accept things as they are and that not everything works according to our liking, our plans, or our expectations define our personal triumph or our personal doom. Losers can still be victors if they know how to rise up to the occasion. Acceptance is the key. And needless to say, the process of acceptance is never complete unless there is either remorse or forgiveness or both, when the situation calls for it.

We have to believe that bad things happen for some good reasons, albeit incomprehensible at the time we perceived defeat. I personally believe that failure is always a blessing in disguise but we will never know unless we recognize it ourselves.

Life is journey because we have to keep moving until we reach our final destination. And if things don’t work according to our expectations, we have to make a conscious effort to accept things as they are, and start dreaming again and again, if necessary. It is never too late to start a journey over and over again because there is always hope for as long we live, and this fact we must accept as a basic premise.

Since I was young, I have always wondered what life is all about.

Is it about the things that we aspire? That life is simply about our quest for personal success, fame and prosperity.

Or is it about the people around us? That is – we live to be the keeper of our family, our country and our fellow human beings.

Is life about what would make us feel good? That life is about the pursuit for pleasure, peace of mind, happiness, freedom, recognition or love.

Or is it about keeping our Divine faith? That life on earth is temporal and all the things that we do here are meant to serve God to gain eternal life.

But maybe life is all about all of these. If it is, then to live a full life becomes a very tall order given our everyday encounter with failure, enmity, frustration, temptation, our individual frailties, and even inevitable events.

The way life is lived depends not only upon ourselves but also on the people and the conditions, foreseen and unforeseen, around us.

If life then is a journey, very few would obviously reach their destination. Maybe that’s why there is an IF at the center of life as a constant reminder that life is something we must endure and survive.

For me, life is not really about reaching my ultimate pre-determined destination because at the end of the day, I may not reach it, after all. Life, for me, consists of the bits and pieces of things and events, big or small-good or bad, that come along my way in the course of my journey. Over the years, I learned that life is not much about reaching the destination. It is about how I carry on the journey that matters.

In the course of my voyage, I realized that I only need to know, carry and keep in mind a few things that really matter because there is always sense in traveling light. And from this perspective, I realized the beauty of my journey in this world called life.