Influences

Last night, I was musing over the people that influence me in a really important part of my life. Over the last 10 years, I’ve had a total of about 10 people that I would say has influenced me. Some have been there the entire 10 years, some have been there less than a year; but, each one has left an important impact.

Obviously, it would be silly to assume that we could keep all of our influences. There’s a reason for that – as people who are continually growing and developing, sometimes we grow and develop so as to be beyond someone’s capacity to help us. Other times, we’ve developed in a direction that the influence wouldn’t have considered – that is, their ability to help us.

And that’s okay, it really is.

But we should also make sure that some do stick around. It’s very tempting, as Everett Bogue puts it, to ‘keep running for never and ever‘. At some point, we have to have some kind of accountability to ourselves – otherwise, in our desperate search to find ourselves, we’re going to forget who we are.

Who do you want to be in 2011? Let me know in the comments!