Life is a great adventure if you want it to be. All of my life I have been on a continuous and focused journey to discover who I am and who I want to become. This essential quest has not always been an easy one, but it has never been boring or uneventful. At times much confusion and stress existed, but for the most part, I have tried to remain positive and active. As many of my friends and family know, my personal life motto for helping to discover the “truth in my life” is the following: “Believe! Don’t dream big; dream bigger! The sky is the limit so reach for the stars!”
Traveling to Egypt to teach was another one of my attempts to dream bigger and discover another aspect of who I could become—an educator in a foreign country teaching English as a second language. I wanted to make some kind of positive difference in the lives of young adult students and dreamed that I would be able to accomplish this successfully. I knew in my heart that I had always been a dedicated and competent teacher. Thus, I felt I would be able to do this if “I WORKED REALLY HARD AND BELIEVED IN MYSELF” as always (another one of my philosophies in life). I also “believe” that I can make my fantasies become realities. My delightful experiences depicted in my book and my life changing teaching experience once again verified that “anything is possible” if I believe and work hard which I did. Therefore, naming my book Because I Believed in Me (My Egyptian Fantasy Came True) was absolutely the perfect title.
As a young girl and teenager, I was somewhat shy and extremely insecure. Because I was very intelligent, my friends tended to be the more popular and better students in my school. However, I never really felt as if I truly belonged in this group. Looking back now, I realize it was just silly thinking on my part, but at the time, I was still searching for the real Randi and the future Randi and truly had no idea who she was. I buried myself in my books in search of knowledge to help me with this problem. I chose to become a teacher partly because I loved learning new things every day (and still do) and wanted to share my love of learning with others. I also knew there had to be more to life than the small West Virginia town in which I grew up so I dreamed of faraway and exotic lands. When I began teaching and married my husband Bill, we began to save our money to make that once-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe. This experience opened up my eyes to so many new cultures and the many fresh ideas I had been longing to find, and I knew it could not be the last time I explored the world. Forty-nine countries later, I am still dreaming of seeing more of this remarkable world.
I knew that I had experienced some very extraordinary moments on my travels around the world and had absorbed so much, but I was not confident anyone would want to share my experiences or my insights. However, after I returned home from Egypt, I knew I had experienced something really incredible— something very life changing for me, and that maybe my new and profound insights would help others to find themselves in some minute way. I was not the same person. I had uncovered a new Randi with new dreams to achieve, new challenges to pursue, new careers and new projects to begin. I was never ready to retire, so my book has now put me on another exciting adventure or untraveled pathway to finding all of the challenging possibilities that lie ahead of me in my future.
Am I finished or even close to attaining my own personal truth about my life? I do not think so, and I am actually pleased about this because I never want to wake up one morning and not have a new dream or goal to fulfill. Thus, the journey to find my truth will continue until the day my life ends, and I know I will leave this earth feeling that there was so much more that I could have done.
Randi D. Ward
April 26, 2013
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