One of the most important things I have learned this year is that I am in charge of my destiny, and have control of my life’s journey. My life is like a painting. I am the artist, and my life is my canvas. The color palate holds my thoughts, opinions, and decisions. I don’t have control of everything, but just like I choose the dark and light colors, I am able to choose the decisions in my life. Just like green, a mixture of yellow and blue, some decisions have an equal amount of good and bad and are difficult to decipher. Over time life experiences overlap. They all blend which create diversity in our lives, or in our paintings. Similar to how an artist decides which brushes will work best with his painting, I have to choose which people will help me rather than hurt me. Their influences on me are the brush strokes that give volume to my painting. In life if we make a mistake we can’t go back and change it. It is the same with painting. Once it’s down on paper it can’t be redone, but we can create something beautiful around the original mistake to represent growth, maturity, and a lesson learned. We end our lives with a grand masterpiece full of trials and tribulations, loves and losses, failures and successes, and highlights and shadows. Everyone’s picture is different. We each are a unique artist who is given the power to design how are lives will look. Not one of us is the same. We are the painters of our lives.