Pat Bean's blog

“Live your life so when the time comes for the funeral the preacher won’t have to bullshit the peoples.” Baba Olatunji

My friends at the Standard-Examiner, where I ended my 37-year Journalist career gave me this at my retirement party. It was drawn by the newspaper’s cartoonist Cal Grondal — and I love it The image is of me standing on the top of Angel’s Landing in Zion as a bird to note my birdwatching passion. It is different — and I love it.

Simply Being Oneself

I’ve oft quoted the saying: “Live, so that when you die, you know the difference.” Baba Olatunji, the late African drummer whose words started off this blog, said it his way. We’re both saying the same thing, but the words we use to do it are worlds apart.

And this is me and my longtime good friend, Kim, who is as different from me as a hummingbird is from an eagle. The photo was taken at a photo booth that was part of her son’s wedding reception. I love it, too.

Which of course got me wondering about how people can be both so alike, and yet so different.

I started off life wanting to fit in, which was impossible. There was no way I was ever going to have a cashmere sweater set like the girls I wanted to be like. And there was no way, I could not be the first to raise my hand to answer any question the teacher asked – whether I knew it or not, although mostly I knew the answers.

I see myself as once being like Hermione in the Harry Potter books — except she is cute and I was a skinny, freckled girl with tangled, nearly white hair (until it darkened when I had children) who talked too loud.

I can’t tell you how many times in my life I’ve been told to shush-it.

Then one day, too many years later, I realized that I got loud when I got excited about something, and that my friends accepted me as I was. I even started to pity those people who never got too loud and interrupted conversations; they probably lacked the passion for life that I had.

I then began noticing that the people I liked most were nothing like me. They had their own quirks. Sometimes we filled the holes in the other. They learned from me, and I learned from them.

I then began to accept that it was OK to be different. Accepting that, I finally began to discover my own self. I’m still discovering. And it’s wonderful.

Bean Pat: Monday Motivation http://tinyurl.com/jye74xu Short and sweet, and something you should do for sure.