Date: 2/29/2024
Tags: Life
I had an opportunity this week to briefly reminisce with an individual who was raised in the same community where we both attended the same Catholic elementary and high school. While we had these common elements in our lives, we really did not know each other in our growing up years except for a few people we each knew in elementary school, and our experiences regarding teachers that we had at the high school level. As we discussed our growing up experiences, the topic turned to our families, and the expectations that our parents held for our future success. Each of us grew up in an Italian household where we were expected to achieve high academic standards, take on tasks around the house and assume part time and full time employment in order to pay for our high school and college tuition. We each worked factory jobs at various times in order, per our fathers, to learn the value of hard work. Each of us attained leadership positions in our work careers, and each of us attained the position of mayor in our communities.
There is a saying that “Disappointment is a temporary detour on the road to success,” and while I can look back on my upbringing and my career, there were instances when life threw me a few curveballs, and decisions had to be made as to future choices for my family and my career. I truly believe that we are all the composite of our life experiences, and good or bad, our life experiences mold us into the people we are today. Those life experiences have truly impacted who I am today, and while my mother and father have been gone almost twenty years, I would like to believe that they would be happy by what I have achieved in my life.
As I reflect back on the past seventy-four years of my life, I have adopted a philosophy that “There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it.” I have been realistic in understanding that there would be pitfalls in my life that I knew I could never fix, and simply had to accept the fact that life provided me with certain losses that I needed to understand and grow from in the future. Despite the downturns in my life there has always been one constant that has pulled me through difficult times, and that is the love of my family and friends. We all live with certain expectations placed on us by our parents, employers, ourselves or by others, and when we miss the mark, hopefully, we find the right path, and because we are not immune from setting expectations for others, we need to remember as Donald Miller states, “when you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can see them for who they are.”