I was asked by a fellow student President today about what defines me.

Well my immediate response was:

• Computers/Programming
• Tramping
• Church

I was then asked how much of that I was doing this year given how busy I was.

My response was very muted because all three have been essentially zero. I have started on a computer science project but haven’t touched it in about two months. I have been tramping twice but that is it all my outdoors exercise this year. And church, well I have been twice, I have been to youth group three times as well but given that a quarter of the year has gone by I have not done much of the things that define me.

I was just reading something someone else I know had written, it was a list of goals. The only problem I noticed with this list of goals was that the majority of them actually had nothing to do with the definition of this person and instead were most of the things that this person’s friends define themselves through. So that made me think. Should we be defining ourselves in who we are or who we could pretend to be by copying the acts of others?

I don’t think we would achieve much more then heartache by trying to take the defining aspects of others and stuff them into our lives. Because at the end of the day we are all unique and all different. If we were all the same we would be boring!

Now I am not saying that we should not have goals and not have role models. However, what I am saying is our goals should be what we can achieve and our role models should be people that we want to be like; not clone.

Life. It is a celebration of diversity not of similarity.