1% Better Everyday

This year, I will be turning 21 and have made the stark realization that I’ve lived almost half my life carefree, in oblivion to many of the questions that I look for answers to today. I realized that my carefree days had come to an end once I started to question the many things in life. ‘What is the purpose of my life?’ happens to be one such question that still manages to frequently keep me up at night. To be very honest, I wasn’t a person that thought too deeply about such things. I used to live life just going about my usual day to day activities; attend school, eat, sleep, study, and maybe have an outing with my friends during the weekends, just like most other people my age.

On a random Tuesday some time ago however, it struck me that I was stuck in this static routine. It was almost like I was living the same day on repeat, every single day. Although this seemed quite obvious and I had felt this way before to some extent, as of late this thought began to occur to me more frequently and deeply than it usually would. It’s probably due to the fact that I was stuck indoors, alone with my thoughts, for a prolonged period of time due to the lockdown which came about as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This in turn made me feel the frequent repetition of my daily activities more intensely as compared to other days. I recall when this thought first began to haunt me, it was extremely mind-boggling and quite difficult to take in all at once. Since then, I have been spending quite a lot of my time trying to piece together the purpose of my life and what I could do to make it more meaningful.

After much thought and the many hours spent pondering over it, I think that to me, life is all about learning and doing what I can in my own capacity to make the world a better place. I think that both of these things are interconnected and they go hand in hand with one another. In my personal opinion, life is all about taking it one day at a time and making sure that I make a conscious effort to better myself by at least 1% every single day. I believe my existence in this world would only be meaningful if I use my life to make this planet a better place; to add on to the good in the world. I may not be able to do this in significant ways, but whatever mundane activities I do commit myself to, I feel that I should perform them with kindness, love, and positivity. Sure, it may become exhausting at a point and you might feel discouraged to keep doing good in this society where we see so much hate and negativity, but we need to keep in mind, like Martin Luther King Jr. once said “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Hence, it is my belief that there are two ways that you can live your life. You can either dread life and view it as some sort of never-ending painful struggle, or you can decide to live in the moment, tolerate and make the most out of all the bad and the good days that constitute your life because at the end of the day all you have are those very moments. Therefore, I believe that we shouldn’t let a single moment pass without experiencing it to the fullest while it lasts.

I have learned that life is a journey of discovering things that bring us joy; the things that ignite a flame in us, and then once you do find them, it’s all about figuring out how to expand on them in ways that your joy can reach other people and cause them to feel a sense of happiness as well. In short, life to me is a path of slowly but steadily reaching that best version of yourself while radiating positive energy to society. Our society which tends to get hooked on the negatives more often than not, could definitely use your rays of light.

In conclusion, what I have come to understand in my 21 years of existence is that life is a process of continuous improvement. Life isn’t a straight line. There will most definitely be setbacks and obstacles to face but it all comes down to your attitude towards life and how you face these challenges. That being said, everything that I believe in and follow and everything that I have said so far, is just my opinion based merely on the knowledge I have accumulated in the past few years of my life. Every day is a new opening for lessons to be learned and I for one, am beyond grateful to be able to embark on this journey called life.

– Rtr. Anjalee Wanduragala