Yeah, you.
Age is not a barrier to success.
It is not a barrier to success because success is not measured by wealth, or achievements in competition with others. It is measured in the impact we have on those around us, and in the way their lives are and will be different and better because of our contact, our ideas and ideals and the way we choose to conduct ourselves. We help people: help them to be stronger and happier and to smile more and make more of themselves than they would in vacuo, and that makes the world a better place.
With a hug, or kind words, or even just a nod, we can change the whole world. Never forget that the world is a construct of our minds: we each carry our own world with us, and the apparently objective existence we share is merely the gestalt form of our own subjective realities. We can make a difference, but it takes effort every time.
There’s no part of your world that won’t be better if you have the emotional reserves to face it down, tame it and make it your own, and if I can help you along the way with that, what possible reason could I have not to?
Fear, of course.
Helping someone means being vulnerable: we give of ourselves and open up so as to show people the way – our way – and there’s nothing more terrifying than subjecting your inner self to the scrutiny of the wider world. It’s scary, and it’s difficult, and sometimes you just can’t see the good it will do or the reason for doing it.
The best of us, I think, can trust from bitter, hard-fought experience that it will help. I don’t think that everyone who wants to lend a hand has to have suffered before they can. I just know that it’s the hardest things I’ve had to live through, and the tiny sparkles of help in the darkness, that have made me who I am and given me the little wisdom and empathy that I have, and that I use to help others.
Those tiny sparkles haven’t always come from expected quarters: some of the people who have helped me the most have been younger than me, with less experience of life, and I don’t think they even know how much they’ve done. The best I can do for them now is to pay it forward and just keep trying to help, trying to succeed.
This is from the