Intentional

Live intentionally.

Don't let things just happen but deliberately set out to grow into the person you want to be.

I'm reading Jean Fleming's Pursue the Intentional Life for the second time. She writes about people, as they grow older, becoming more concentrated versions of themselves.

 'A complainer at forty will, with much practice, engrave the response in his or her bones by seventy. Self-centredness will intensify. Bitterness, allowed to take root and grow over decades, engulfs and consumes in advanced age. Anyone living a frittering existence at thirty will, apart from a serious course correction, end up frittering away an entire life.'

So you need to ask yourself: what sort of person do you want to be? How can you deliberately set out to become that person?

The best way to be who you want to be is to practice those character traits you want to grow in. If you want to be kinder, do kind things; spend time with kind people and see what it is that makes them the way they are.

Simple, really.

But hard, too, as we have to break habits in action and thought pattern. We have to overcome our natural inertia. We have to make a concerted effort to both weed out those traits we don't like in ourselves and to grow in those we desire.

Simple. Hard. Worth it.