Today on the way home, I read Anna Quindlen’s Being Perfect - a very short guide to a happy life … I like reading those inspirational guides … they allow me to take a step back and evaluate myself, my behavior, my approach, my way of dealing with others … more often than not, they tend to work as motivation to take charge of your own life, get in touch with the real you, and to make the best out of the worst… here, some of the most profound passages I read in Being Perfect:

…This is the hard work of life in the world, to acknowledge within yourself the introvert, the clown, the artist, the homebody, the goofball, the thinker. Look inside. That way lies dancing to the melodies spun out by your own heart.

someday, sometime, you will be somewhere, maybe on a day like today–a berm overlooking a pond in Vermont, the lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset. Maybe something bad will have happened: you will have lost someone you loved, or failed at something at which you badly wanted to succeed. And sitting there, you will fall into the center of yourself. You will look for some core to sustain you. And if you have been perfect all your life and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where that core ought to be.

I dont want anyone I know to take that terrible chance. And the only way to avoid it is to listen to that small voice inside you that tells you to make mischief, to have fun, to be contrarian, to go another way. George Elliot wrote, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” It is never too early either. take it from someone who has left the backpack full of bricks far behind… and every day feels light as a feather!