From the point of view of the great thinkers throughout the ages, the lives most of us are living are far removed from how we intended to live.  Now, whether you want to believe in reincarnation or merely that as we progress through the stages of life we lose sight of the true essence of our childhood goals and dreams, we very rarely end up doing what we had planned to do.  For those of you who have continued along the same path that you set for yourself early on in life, good on you.  For you have somehow kept your dreams alive through the many trials and tribulations that come before us to test our resolve.  As children we have dreams of what we would like to be ‘when we grow up’, but most of those are short-lived due to the many influences around us.  Now these dreams may have been influenced by our role models, but somewhere deep down inside we know what we should be according to our make-up.  This may seem hard to believe taking into account our age and maturity, but do age and maturity really help us achieve our individual destinies or do they hinder us?  With age comes wisdom, or so they say, but what is really meant by that is the ability to use the knowledge we have acquired over the years, to assist us in making the best decisions and judgements in life.  Now considering the fact that the knowledge that we acquire year after year is based on the assumptions, perceptions, and interpretations of others, how can we say that the knowledge is accurate or even true for us.  Each of us has a different view of the world according to the influences that have guided us while ‘growing up’, so we can not say that one persons’ interpretation of a text, hypothesis, or even interpretative conjecture is more correct than another’s.  To go one step further, even our scientific discoveries and so-called proven theories are based on the assumption that their testing methods are to be trusted.  To go to an extreme, maybe 1 + 1 doesn’t = 2.  Maybe all this time we have been told this and believed it, while in truth the assumption has been incorrect.  We take it for granted that a tree is a tree only because we have been told it is, but what if we had been lied to or the person, who originally started teaching others that a tree was a tree, was wrong?  We would have to rethink our whole concept of language and how we view the world and everything in it.