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It is being so long since I have posted something, written by me and about me, on this blog. And for those who like my blog and check from time to time to see what new stuff I have written, about maybe things that happen in my life, I am sorry to have disappointed you with anything new. … But I promise I will try to find time for new sharing.
What meaning have challenges in our life and what should they represent for each other? What would challenges represent for me?
It is one year since I decide to move into a complete new place, new country, new society and culture, the kind of decision that changed my life somehow completely. One year and things looks different right now. I lived new exciting experiences, some of which were sad and heartbroken, others happy and joyful, some accomplishments and failures, feelings of stability but also of insecurity; I have learned new languages, new habits, and new people but not to forget about the old life patterns and style that brought me sometimes to the end of my limits of acceptance and endurance, patterns that I was not yet prepared to change or improve. One year, time that I spend in finding the best ways to go further for achieving my life and professional goals, one year of analyzing my mistakes in order to make sure I take the best decisions and I surely go in the right direction. There were times of self confidence and believe but also times of disbelieve and low self esteem. I sometimes wanted to be alone, other times crowded by people.
Being in a complete new environment means also being surrounded by complete strangers, people that you may not know if you should trust or not, people who ended to misuse my feelings but also lot of those who smoothly touched my heart with joy and compassion. There were times of appreciation and times of regret; times of love and times of hate. But two things which matter most were the feelings of having learned something new about me, of having learned a new lesson that made me who I am today and specially accepting to be a lucky person who had and still has at her side, a partner that knows how to bring the best out of me, a partner who encourages me and supports me in all my decisions. For that, I am most grateful and thankful.
This article is an introduction in a new series of short stories about my life and my experiences. It is mostly about life lessons and challenges. I believe one must experience the most diverse things in life in order to be able to appreciate not only the good out of every experience, but the lessons out of those bad ones.
Yes, there were good times! Yes, there were bad times, too! But all those good and bad experiences are the end result of today. And for what it matters, today I am happy. At the end of each bad or good day I remember myself to appreciate my life, to appreciate what I have and what I am. I smile in front of the mirror and I try to feel the feeling of happiness. I sometimes lie myself but after few seconds smiling in that mirror, I can really feel it, I can really feel the moment of appreciation, the feeling of gratefulness. It may not always be easy, but I also remember myself that in every experience there is a lesson. A lesson that I have to learn a lesson that represents the end result of my being. And so, at the end of each day, I feel more mature, more confident, blessed and definitely stronger.
As I have learned during all this time – we are what we produce out of ourselves; and we should be happy for the best parts of our life experiences – the good parts as well as the bad ones, comparing the example of the need for salt and sugar in our daily meals. We cannot feed ourselves with only sweets as well as our life would be senseless without bad experiences from which we are suppose to learn something good out of them. Our meals taste much better by adding additional ingredients such as salt and pepper. Bad, good, all this combined is going to be reflected into our final product, our cooked meal or our present being.
My message in these shared thoughts is that we have to learn to combine life experiences; to learn how to use the bad experience to our own advantage. To learn what has to be changed. Learn to enjoy all the experiences we may have. This will bring joy and satisfaction to our life. Learn how to enjoy ourselves, with good and bad, with tears and smiles, with new and with old.
I want to tell you about one concrete example, explaining what I mean about challenges.
One year ago I moved to Copenhagen, Denmark. In the hope that everything will be fun and easy, I find out that stepping out of my comfort zone was much harder than I ever wanted to estimate. The first challenge, that of learning Danish language which I thought it should be easy, it ended to be the most difficult one. Deciding to learn Danish language is, first of all, just as deciding to learn two languages in the same time – the written and the spoken one. I struggled a lot at the beginning … maybe also because I was constantly telling myself and others how difficult it is and how impossible it seems to be when I needed to act. It took me a month to start and after starting it took me few weeks to get the basics. I may have had the need for a tutor, a native one, but I stubborn into thinking that I can do it all by myself – as usual. I decided at one point that school would be too slow for me and so I start teaching myself the advanced part of the Danish language, challenging myself each day more and more. H. C. Andersen’s fairytales became my favorite ones and because I found not only the books but also audios, I was listening again and again for many days in a row. In the beginning nothing made sense, I was not able to understand much but I never gave up believing that one day all this will seem very easy … and indeed that day came, though after about two other months. I start to volunteer in centers where Danish was the main communication language, I start discussing with different kind of people on streets and shops, I listen constantly to radio and watched news on TV, I got involved in so many activities as possible in order to improve the language that, at the end of about six months I could handle quite well. I was and still am proud of my successes in this area; the kind of challenge that seems impossible became possible, only that it took some time. The time is not ended and I still have to improve a lot, but I did it. I believe, life teaches us how to face problems and challenges in a kind and easy manner but we seem to struggle believing that, and we sometimes make out of our experience a negative and hard one.
This was and still is, for example, the kind of challenge I had to face when decisions about moving here seemed to be reasonable. (I will talk about other challenges in the next article)
My next article will relate to the following question:
“Why do we tend to spend so much time judging and criticizing others? Why are not we spending the same amount of time improving ourselves / our own life? Is it because most of those who spend time on criticizing others life have nothing interesting to say about their own? Then why not develop the interest in finding the best that lies in us. In this way we enrich our life and let others enrich their own. This can be viewed as a life lesson, but why is it than so hard to apply this lesson to our own experiences?”
I will relate this question to my own life experience and a new challenge, but in the upcoming article.
If you would like to read about specific kind of examples I have linked in this article, I will appreciate your comment. And so I will introduce your question to my article where I will post a concrete example of the kind of experience you want to read about.
Thank you for reading this article. Enjoy life!
Gabriela
