You start preparing when you're thirty for the person you'll be at eighty.
--Janice Clark

We can't get away from ourselves, at least not entirely. Who we were at ten and twenty and forty and fifty remain as threads in our tapestries. Many of us shudder because some details of our personal panorama weren't so very pretty. But that's the way life is. We are what we are. And yet, we have examples of favorable changes, too. How we were never kept us from becoming who we wanted to be. This truth continues to reign in our lives.

We all know women and men who continue to be enthused about even the tiny happenings in the passing of a day. A bird's flight from the porch to a nearby tree to feed its young, the laughter of children passing the house on their way home from school, the family reunions, large or small, bring smiles and memories that comfort. Probably we envy those folks, unless we happen to be them already. In either case, imitating others or serving as their role models helps to strengthen our positive responses to life's details. No matter how old we are, there is still joy to be felt. And there is still time to change and grow.

There is no rule that says I have to be and think and act the same way my whole life. Today is a clean slate. I can be who I want to be.