Sculpting Your Best Self
How Self-Improvement is Best Done Through Sculpting Others
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You are a block of stone.
Chipped and cracked and carved by life.
Molded since birth, you now embody a unique shape, reflecting all that you’ve become.
Your parents were the first to sculpt you using the only tools they knew how. Tools given to them by generations of parents before them, they whittled you into the shape they wanted, or needed, or were proud of. A sculpture of sorts.
Their tools may have been blunt, leaving gashes still visible in your adult life. Their techniques may have been lackluster, leaving scars that will never heal. But they did their best, whatever that was, and you left home quite unlike how you arrived.
None of us left unscathed.
Even with a parent’s perfect love, we left the nest and entered the world an imperfect version of ourselves to be further sculpted by relationships and experiences, trials and tragedies.
And those trials were tough.
Maybe you were fired from a good job, a dismissal leaving your surface unfinished, rough, and displeasing to future employers.
Maybe a spouse cheated on you, or you them, crumbling away pieces of yourself never to be replaced or, if somehow glued back together, forever fragile.
Or maybe your life seems just peachy, but deep inside you’ve lost your sense of direction, your purpose, your guiding light, leaving nothing but a thin stone shell, constantly in danger of breaking open to bare your secret truth to others.
Every trial molds you for better or worse.
It’s the molding for the better that you seek.
You Are Not Alone
Everyone wants to improve their situation, their lot in life.
We can do so in infinite ways.
Marriage can be a source of positive transformation. Work can lift us up. Friends and books can inspire us, driving us to hammer out a wholly new version of ourselves that’s unrecognizably better, smoother, more refined.
