Become who you are...

 

An absolutely lovely morning: raining hard and with delightful coolness. I’m in my office writing these thoughts with the window open (I did turn off the furnace) and I have some incense burning. Right outside the window, probably just over three-feet away from me as I sit at the computer, is my bird feeder and the birds are feeding. I guess I’m not visible through the screen and the darkened room; the only light is the computer screen. The cool, moist breeze blows through and all is bliss. Ah……..

As I move more into my writing and contemplative life, I find the quiet of quiet (sitting in a room alone!) to be most enjoyable and soul-satisfying. I realize it is, perhaps, a reaction to the over-load of input and busy-ness of the last few decades of life. The self-analysis side of me realizes that my character is such that reading, watching the clouds and the sea, walking in nature, and observing it all is such a part of who I am that when I’m not doing that, I become stressed. Curious, ‘eh?

Of, perhaps not. One of the great lessons in life is finally coming to the realization that we are who we are. Brilliant. No, of course not. But it seems we try incessantly to “become” something that we convince ourselves we need to become. We listen to society’s cues and expectations and then adapt ourselves to those cues. We may deny it vociferously, but if we slow down and think – just for a bit – we will realize that who we are today it more of a product of society’s model than our own. We can rationalize (rational…lies) the hell out of it – we need money, we can go further if we comply with others, we need to honor and respect our cultural expectations – and pretend that what we are doing (even if we don’t like doing it at all!) is crucial to our survival.

I wrote earlier of Thoreau’s marvelous phrase, the classic “most men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.” There is another description of living that resonates with me. This one is about the writer James Joyce: “To preserve his integrity, to avoid involvement in popular causes, to devote himself to the life of an artist, he felt that he must go abroad.” Both of these observations are important because, if for no other reason, they so reflect my current outlook: the need to listen to the soft voice that whispers of love and connection and follow one’s bliss and heart. Namaste’.