By Ahmet Abdulaziz….
29th October is my birthday. I was born on this day in 1955, so just this week I completed 64 years of my life.
Interesting 29 is the most common date in our family. My wife was born on 29th of December. My eldest son was born 
on 29th of July. But that’s not all. I just received the news that the granddaughter of my younger was born on the 29th October. So we have one more close relative born on this date.
Every year on this date, I take some time to look back on all these years that I have spent. Last year I had to look back 63 years of my life. This time I took a little more time because now it is 64 years to look back. When I do this, I simply cut myself off for a short period of time from everything around me. I take this time to relive my past. I do not know if other people do it or not, but I do it and have been this for many years.
Reliving my past gives me a chance to recall the events that went down memory lane, to be forgotten. I simply love to pass through them, feeling myself passing through the same period of time. This exercise, on one hand, makes me enjoy the happy moments of my life, but also makes me realise that life is not something easy. Life is full of all sorts of problems, bad luck, moments of grief and sorrow.
Reliving them makes me realise that I made many mistakes in life. In my heart, I feel that things might have been much better had I not made those mistakes then.
But at the same time, I realise that it is not just me who makes mistakes in life. Every person on this earth makes mistakes, and feels sorrow and grief. Almost everyone in the world realise at some particular stage of life, the effects of the wrong decisions made in the past.
But all this exercise makes me proud of myself. Looking back I realise that I had successfully struggled through bad patches of my life. In fact, no goal in life can be achieved without struggling. The same happened to me in the past and is continuing to.
I remember I was not a good student in the early stages of my academic life. But then all of a sudden I became a successful student. I really worked very hard to attain exceptionally high grades in school.
In my professional life, I always found myself struggling, due to my inherent weaknesses. I am not one who can market myself. So I worked very hard to earn for my family. However, I always felt happy, because struggling with happiness always made life easier for me.
Migrating from Pakistan to the TRNC, and restarting my life from scratch. With no job or financial security or support in hand, restarting life in a place where nobody knows you and the serious problem of language barrier existed, I struggled hard to set up a new life. Looking back I really feel proud of myself, and of my wife who supported me in all difficult situations.
However, the exercise of looking back into my life always provides me with more confidence to set up new goals for the future. So today once again I have critically reviewed my progress towards my long term goals. Unfortunately today I realised that I did not move ahead according to the decisions that I had taken last year. I found out that I did not do much to achieve my next goals.
So once again today I have recharted my goals for the future, and trying to commit myself to work harder to achieve them.
