“We made it?”

I look up to the sky
And now the world is mine
I’ve known it all my life
I made it, I made it!
I used to dream about, the life I’m living now
I know that there’s no doubt.
I made it, I made it!

Kevin Rudolf – I Made It 

Today I went to church after not having been there for two weeks! Yes this has been a recurring problem for me. However, I witnessed the induction of my former Principal as Chalice bearer after being given the Bishop’s licence! She had retired a couple of years ago from the school I teach at and I thought retirement meant taking things easy. After all she had accomplished so much and ended – some may say – at the pinnacle of her profession. Well apparently not for her! I was really happy for her because she was embarking on a new passion; a role I had never seen her in before and who knows maybe at one point she had never seen herself there either. But it is a role that affords her the opportunity to say, “I made it”.

Here are some questions for you today. How many of you can say right now, I’ve made it? I have done everything there is to do and I have everything I need to have and so that’s it. Well if we have achieved something we always wanted to achieve that’s great but do we remain satisfied with that?

For many, to “make it” means success but there are many persons who “make it” on a daily basis, but once the thrill of making it is over, they are left feeling empty and immediately have to set a new goal to capture that feeling again. It eventually becomes a cycle that may last their lifetime. So it begs the question: can we be satisfied with what we have already done. Will there always be a need to conquer new heights and reach just a little further or even charter a new course?

My answer is YES. It’s okay to reach the success you dreamed about yesterday today and look forward to a success you haven’t fully formed, but is in the process of being crafted in your minds eye. If you think about the fact that we do not die immediately after we achieve whatever we initially set out to achieve, then you will realise that wanting more and dreaming of more is not a bad thing. Once you have achieved it there is nothing else to fine tune, you cannot erase the experiences of that past and start all over to get the same goals. So it’s natural to want to achieve something else to jump over a new hurdle or break down even more barriers.

There are persons who have remained in the same job for many, many years and that’s a great accomplishment. However, that does not have to be the road we all travel. Change is constant and as we get older, we too change. When I was younger I wanted to be a nurse and so many other things. But the older I got, the more I realised what I like and what I don’t like and because of that my ambitions changed. For some person one passion can drive their entire life and for others there are many that they want to explore and neither avenue is more gratifying than the other. They both have their worth, because the person associated with each path follows their God given idiosyncrasies.

Success comes not only from being focused on one path your entire live but from knowing that you pursued that thing or those things that represent your passion or passions. Its better to have made it many times over than to have never made it at all