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Get Your Own Voice Player ManageHere I sit as my pen begins to romp across the paper; I look back on my life and find a notable paucity of achievements and memorable experiences. For once, I feel complete with warm feelings and heightened self-esteem. I have chosen the road of an artist, - a choice requiring hard work and dedication. While my journeys have caused me pain, it has also taught me responsibility, independence, and survival. In the course of these painful changes, I have learned that the secret to successfully achieving a goal is perseverance. I continue along my journey knowing it is worth the risk and heartache, for one day it will all be rewarded.The most significant experience in my life has not been a single event, but my young adult years between the ages twenty and thirty which I spent working as a waitress at my mother’s restaurant. Fortunately, working as a waitress is a varied routine, with an interesting group of customers: white and black, Asian and Hispanic, doctors and lawyers. Over the years I have watched with interest the arrival of customers’ new cars, new babies – and new dogs. Being a waitress has helped me to look beyond the surface of people who are different kinds of achievers from those I encounter every day. It gave me a true sense of what it means to make the most out of very little.While discovering the strengths of so many different kinds of people, I also discovered some of my own strengths. I discovered my ability to respond to physical as well as academic challenges. I realized that I am able to depend on my own inner resources. This discovery of my own strengths and my ability to endure came as a revelation to me. Being a waitress has taught me to be thankful for what I am, and not for what I have. That joyful and fatalistic acceptance of whatever life holds, has shaped me into the person I am today.The final test of our lives will not be how much we have lived, but how we have lived, not how tempestuous our lives have been, but how much bigger, better and stronger there trials have left us. Not how much money, fame or fortune we have laid up here on earth, but how many treasures we have laid up in Heaven!Megiddo Message
