We gather around as a family, share memories, views, and thoughts and all the great times we had. After checking the watch on your wrist, you realise it is time for you to leave. Kisses shower like rain drops, hugs come to you like a bird incubating it’s eggs from the cold of the world. Warm faces fill with smiles like the river fills to the brim during a storm.

You turn your back on everyone you’ve ever known, loved and cared for. You make yourself brave and strong, but deep inside it’s eating you. Your knees are trembling to step down a path you have never walked before. A whole reality that you have never experienced before waits ahead. It’s always scary at first and we’d hope there was an alternative, but that is life – nightmares that just come to us without waiting or giving us a chance to go to bed.

Eventually, you have to sacrifice everything and everyone you want be with and put hundreds of miles between you and them. Why? Because you are in the early stages of adulthood. It is time for you to face the world and the waves of the oceans on your own. There is no two ways about it; you have to prove yourself, what you are made of and what your capabilities are.

Visit the forest; you will see a cocoon that is nearly impossible to crack protecting life inside it. When the butterfly reaches its full maturity, it has to struggle to crack the hardened cocoon so that it can taste the ripe fruit of freedom in the forest. The suffering it experiences prepares it for the hardships there are to be faced in its lifespan. If you were to help to set it free, then you would break the rules of nature. In the case of that butterfly, when troubles come, it will be likely to perish because it was not moulded from birth for the hardships it would face.

In life you can’t take a short cut or detour. Some things, you just have to face. Life is the greatest teacher, she will teach you to be the greatest soldier and she will be the best mentor who will help you discover your true purpose. As a human you have to know what it is to be hungry, what it is to be cold and have nothing to cover yourself. You have to know what hard work is and how to hustle for survival.

A tortoise lays its eggs deep into the sea shore sands, and when they hatch they just lift their tiny little eyes together in their numbers and look for the ocean. There are predators between them and the ocean, thorns and hardships, but they put aside their fear and run for the goal and never lose focus. They know what they want and they are there to achieve their objective. But, without a destination, how then will you have focus if you don’t even know where you want to be in this life?

There is no institution that can teach you about life, you just have to learn and improvise as you go along. It’s always scary at first to do something that has never been done, but we are all unique in our own way. You can’t be me and surely I can’t be you. What I do know is when you want to do something do it now, there is no time better to do it than the present.

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Tell us: What are the things that you find difficult about growing up?