New Age Magazine

Life lessons are always there as you walk your own path of life although they are not always learned right away but later down the road.

In 1973 I entered Kindergarten wearing pink horned rimmed glasses due to my eyes being crossed eyed and the day those broke I celebrated until I got a black horned rimmed glasses. You could hear me scream for joy all the way to China when those pair broke and new improved styles were coming in. At five you really do not know how much it hurts to tease someone and four eyes may not sound like it would hurt but I was five and it did. Being different was not something as a five year old I understood back then nor could a adult really explain it to me either.

Junior High proved to me that girls were more mature then boys for the girls stopped teasing me but the boys continued until the day we turned eighteen. One day I said that those two eyes in the back of my head where to prevent anyone trying to sneak up behind me. The looked on the their face was priceless but then again any boys look of shock is priceless. They were shocked not because of what I said but the fact that I could even speak at all. The girls figured out that I was not mute a long time before we enter Junior High without me even opening my mouth. Boys, you got to love them though because they can be pretty funny at times and so can girls. My lesson here was to speak more often but I rarely did because I was shy and afraid of them not liking me.

High School came with the hardest life lesson anyone can go through because suicide, accidentally death, and cancer took some of our classmates lives. One classmate shot himself to death because his older brother did the same thing and to me that is no reason to kill yourself. It is my own personally opinion that suicide is not the answer for it only leaves a trail of pain for those left behind. One classmate lost his brother to leukemia and it was hard to see him walk the halls making everyone laugh while he was going through chemo. At the time I had not realized that he felt better when people were laughing with him because it took his mind off the pain for a while. No one saw it at the time only with experience of being an adult showed that to me at least. Another classmate lost his brother due to doing something stupid that caused him to drown two week before Graduation. We must have thought we were immortal during our school years but by the time we Graduated at least 12 students were no longer living. Hard way to find out we were not immortal after all.

Adulthood, can someone tell me why I was so anxious to reach adulthood? Now that I am here I want to have more fun as a child not that I mind my age but I did not play enough as a kid. I have responsibilities to family and now I am going start focusing on me for a while. I am single without kids and after having been there for my Grandparents and parents it is time for me now. I learned that you can care for someone else but if you do not also care for yourself your health suffers. I forgot to do that but I shall remember the next time a family member needs caring for. Lessons in life are always there for us to learn whether we want to learn them or not is up to us. I am on a journey of self discovery to learn about whom I am becoming since I already know who I was. Life is not always easy but it is not so hard that we cannot keep going forward to meet what will fall onto our life path.

Written by:Paige McMasters