Growing old is mandatoryGrow  in  lifeGrowing up is optional

Life is a journey; travel it well.  Step out of the history that is holding you back.  Step into the new story you are willing to create.  Time is long, but life is short.  It is up to us to make it sweet.  Our lives today are the history of tomorrow.  The end of the journey is often unpredictable.  It doesn’t really matter who you used to be; what matters is who you’ve become.  We don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can choose where we go from there.  God already knows what we're made of, but perhaps He wants us to learn what we're made of.  The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; and the willingness to learn is a choice.  Your choices decide your fate.  Take the time to make the right ones.

Life isn’t meant to be easy; it’s meant to be lived.  Life is the most difficult exam.  Many people fail because they try to copy others, not realizing that everyone has a different question paper.  Hard words hurt your feelings, but silence breaks your heart.  Excuses make today easy, but tomorrow hard.  Sometimes happy, other times rough.  But with every up and down, we learn lessons that make us strong.  We fall, we rise, we make mistakes, we live, and we learn.  We’re humans, not perfect.  Sometimes there is sadness in our journey, but there is also lots of beauty.  We must keep putting one foot in front of the other even when we hurt, for we will never know what is waiting for us just around the corner.  Never compare yourself to someone else.  Don't join the crowd; you will get lost.  Dare to be different, and you will be found.  If the grass looks greener on the other side, stop staring.  Stop comparing.  Stop complaining.  Start watering the grass you're standing on.

Every day, the clock resets.  Every day is a chance to rewrite your story.  See today as another opportunity that life presents to get things done.  In many ways, life improves with age.  Growing old is a privilege we should appreciate more.  Age is just a number.  Everyone grows old, but not everyone is growing up.  Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others.  Maturity is not measured by age.  By overcoming difficulties, we gain strength and maturity.  It’s an attitude built on experience.  Our experiences, good and bad, make us who we are.  Change is inevitable; growth is optional.

All growth starts at the end of your comfort zone.  Every difficulty is an opportunity for personal growth.  We become mature when we become the authority of our own lives.  Discipline makes today hard, but tomorrow easy.  Never judge the future of a person based on his present conditions, because time has the power to change the black coal into a shiny diamond.  It's easy to judge.  It's more difficult to understand.  Understanding requires compassion, patience, and a willingness to believe that good hearts sometimes choose poor methods.  Through judging, we separate.  Through understanding, we grow.  Life is not always perfect.  Like a road, it has many bends, ups and down.  Sometimes you have to accept the fact that certain things will never go back to how they used to be.  Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.  It may seem like an end until you turn around and find that there is another path that can take you to your destination.

Do not let age dictate your worth; embrace the wisdom that comes with experience.  Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.  Life doesn’t come with instructions.  We can't learn them all at once.  The more we learn to live without, the more we’ll have to live with.  There is so much more to learn from failure than from success.  If we learn from our mistakes, we are intelligent.  If we learn from someone else’s mistake, we are wise.  There are some things we learn best in calm and some in storm.  Until we’re broken, we don’t know what we’re made of.  It gives us the ability to build ourselves all over again, but stronger than ever.  The past will be our teacher if we learn from it.  Failure must teach us, or surely success will not reward us.  Life is a succession of lessons that must be lived to be understood.  We may make mistakes, but we live and learn.  The only mistake in life is not learning a lesson.  Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.  Every single event in our lives, especially the difficult lessons, has made us smarter, stronger, and wiser than we were yesterday.

The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.  It is never too late to be what you might have been.  You live, you learn, and you upgrade.  No matter who you are, no matter what you did, no matter where you've come from, you can always change and become a better version of yourself.  If you have not done enough to create yourself, you will never be able to find yourself.  If you don’t make the time to work on creating the life you want, you’re eventually going to be forced to spend a lot of time dealing with a life you don’t want.  The only way we can learn is to grow.  We grow if we change, and when we change, we learn.  My mother always used to say,  "The older you get, the better you get, unless you’re a banana; Age is something that doesn't matter unless you are a cheese". You don't stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.  Focus on the step in front of you, not the whole staircase.  One breath at a time, one step at a time, one day at a time.  Keep going and keep growing.  You grow through what you go through.  Learn from yesterday, live for today, and hope for tomorrow.

Don’t go through life;  grow through life.  Keep glowing and keep soaring.