One characteristic that we often share with others on our life path is seeking answers to the question: Who am I?
During our childhood we become aware that we are individuals who have similarities and differences with the other people in our world. In seeking to better understand ourselves, we may ask questions like: Who am I? Why am I here? What is the purpose of my life? Is there anything 'special' about me? What do others really think about me? How can I make my life into a positive and healthy journey?
Like life itself, how one chooses to respond to existential questions like these tends to be individualistic and allows us to create our personal life path.

We are constantly facing change in our lives while attempting to make positive and healthy decisions. You and I tend to rely on life experiences in this process with habituation being chosen for managing most of our repetitive decisions.

Reaching various life path junctions we may need to evaluate and decide on a new direction or re-decide to continue along the same path that has worked to some degree for us so far.

These junctions can occur when we realize that our current thoughts, feelings and behaviors are not providing satisfactory outcomes for living life.

Hopefully, we can avoid using mind games like "If only" or "What if" to paralyze us from evaluating and making healthy positive life choices that require some degree of change.

Whether it is a spouse, family member, friend, coworker, or neighbor, many of us know someone who is most eager with their behavior to impose his/her version of what is true and correct for living life.. One of their viewpoints often is that one size fits all and the world would be a better place if everyone thought and behaved in the same way.

Compromise and structuring win-win outcomes for our relationships may often be seen as a weakness and to be avoided. These individuals tend to use certain words to impose their viewpoint like: should, reality, normal, healthy, natural, etc.

Since we live in a world governed by our social interactions with others, it can be most positive for us to understand and develop strategies for dealing with any truth bullies we may have in our world.

Life tends to take on reflective aspects as the years pass. During the latter chapters of our Life Journey, pondering what aspects of my life I'm most proud of can be valuable for introspective learning and sharing with others.

Like writing a personal eulogy, this introspective process can provide challenges to consider the specific choices for the life we have chosen to lead. This is especially the case if we have been blessed to live for many decades.

For example, do I choose to focus on the entire 30,000+ days that I have lived? Do you and I choose to focus on the areas of pride that come during our childhood and youth years or give more attention to the adult years? Do we choose to focus on specific life areas like relationships? Do we focus on the inner and less visible ways we have evolved as independent and unique persons? Do we choose to express our pride about the challenging goals and aspects of life that are more concrete and observable to others?

Each of us will choose a different path to ponder this area of feeling proud for living life's gifts. How we may wish to convey it to others who are important to us will also be individualistic.

Two words from the field of psychology frequently make it into our daily dialogues. We use the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' as labels to quickly convey our perceptions of how we see ourselves.
Like many labels we use in our language, these two words tend to be verbal shorthand in communicating quickly and efficiently a part of who we are.

Counselors are often interested in hearing from clients the processes they used in determining the descriptive labels one has chosen. This process of selecting self-descriptive words for ourselves can be very informative to better understand that person.

A counselor can be asked: "Am I an introvert or extrovert?" The most accurate response is that we usually are both and neither. This type of response is one reason why persons who prefer to frame the world in binary options of 'either-or' can become so frustrated interacting with psychologists.

With so many options available on how we see the world,, many of us tend to gravitate toward 'shortcuts in how we decide what is real or unreal, true or not true, good or bad, right or wrong, etc.
Habituation and binary viewpoints from childhood allow us to more quickly make our personal choices without investing time and energy into individual evaluations. During the movies of my youth, it did not take long to learn that in western movies the 'good guys' were the ones who wore white hats. The ''bad guys' were the ones wearing black hats.
This became visual shorthand for us to know which person was good so we could support and cheer their actions. This visual shorthand also allowed us to label the others as bad guys where we were encouraged by our peer group to offer an occasional 'boo'.

As adults, it can take lots of time and energy to unlearn the habituations we bring from childhood.

The physical and emotional currency of time is one significant characteristic that tends to equalize human beings. Each of us is given the gift of 24 hours, 1440 minutes or 86,400 seconds each day to spend and invest in living our lives by the choices we make.

Unlike many other gifts, this specific gift requires us to spend and invest as it is received. While there is no delay in using time currency, we can actively choose to spend this currency in a wide variety of ways. With introspection do we really understand the various choices that we and other persons make with our spending patterns of time currency and the consequences that come with them?

We begin life as children being dependent on others to survive. With adulthood we achieve and maintain the status of being independent. Our society tends to expect us to continue thinking and behaving as independent and productive adults for as long as possible.

The longer one lives, the more likely we may realize that with aging we may be returning in some ways to the dependency needs of childhood when the presence and assistance of others were essential for our survival.

The individual and personal choices each of us makes on this path will do a great deal to determine our physical and emotional health during the changes taking place with aging and our growing return to dependency on others.