Artists are supposed to be extremely sensitive and introspective, which can be good...and bad. I have a friend who is nearing sixty and has done nothing with her life. Why?

Here's why: Somehow she believes there is a part of her that needs to be nurtured and healed. Granted, we all have that little child that needs constant nurturing within ourselves. The problem is she has spent the better part of forty years doing it.

At what point does meditation, self knowledge and 'going within yourself' become a complete waste of time? The point when you reach sixty and find that the forty years you spent healing yourself has cost you the opportunity of actually ''getting somewhere''. The books she intended to write for those forty long years have taken a backseat to the constant need to ''find herself''. I do love her dearly, but at some stage you have to realize that the world goes on regardless of whether you 'know who you are' or not.

It is with great sadness that i realized that none of us are perfect and none of us are ever going to be perfect. If we were to spend the rest of our lives using esoteric methods of ''going within'' to find a way of healing old wounds, the new will never surface. On a daily basis we are faced with aspects of life that indeed do hurt and affect us, but it helps us to grow. Are we not harping on what is wrong in our lives by constantly trying to 'fix' them? I attempted the whole self-searching episode myself and realized quite quickly that it could become a very disturbing habit.

The world, i learnt, is not concerned with whether or not you have ''found'' yourself and at some point you just have to take a deep breath and get on with life. Its no good dreaming about what you will do with your life one day when you have finished ''finding'' yourself, because we are constantly changing and evolving in our personalities, our natures and our attitudes. This means that ''finding'' yourself is a work in progress and i don't believe we do not know who we are. At times we are misguided, yes, but what has to be, will be. Long live fatalism!

I have this itching suspicion that my darling friend will pass on (to her next life, in her terms) without having ever completed any of her coveted ''life'' works. This makes me sad.

Nothing in the world, unfortunately, replaces determination and I believe the path we travel is set out for us ions before we exist, we don't determine our destiny, we just stall it with all the nonsense we tell ourselves. If you want something and need to do something...DO IT! Because, as i believe...we do only have one life and it isn't who you knew and what you knew that matters when you are gone...but how you lived.

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