Who
Are You Now?
“Know
yourself. Don’t accept your dog’s admiration as conclusive evidence that you re
wonderful.”
Ann
Landers
Are you
the same person you were at three years old? How about fourteen? Or, perhaps,
twenty-three? Of course, you aren’t. People change as they experience life, as
life deals their cards, as they win and lose, and as other people who are
influencers come and go from their lives. We grow and change, our interests expand,
and our priorities change, as we expand our knowledge and experience. It is my belief
that as we age, we become ever more who we are—we incorporate more aspects of
ourselves retrieved from the shadow, inherited from the ancestors, and bequeathed
by our teachers and mentors. The guardrails come down, the defensive barriers
come down, and there we stand unprotected, and hopefully unafraid. Life
experiences change us. We can’t know what we will be like as parents until we
have a baby. We can’t know what marriage is like until we have lived it for
several years. We don’t understand someone else’s pain until we go through it ourselves.
And through all of life’s experiences, we learn about ourselves.
Some
parts of us we don’t like. We begin by trying to shut them out. We try to
ignore them, cast them out through prayer and “betterment campaigns”, project
them onto other people, and when at last, we realize they belong to us, we sigh
and accept. Once accepted, we are sometimes able to incorporate and benefit
from them. Anger is a good example of this: most of the time when we feel
angry, there is a good reason for it. Someone or something is treating us in a
cavalier and unconscious manner. Our anger is there to give us the strength to
defend ourselves. We may lash out, aggressively attack the other, and escalate
the situation to violence. We may blame the one who calls up this anger in us,
or we may shame ourselves for feeling it. Only when we accept it as belonging
to us, are we able to decide whether it is legitimate or not. Anger
incorporated strengthens us, anger lashing out, weakens.
There are
words of wisdom inscribed in the wall at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi that say
simply, “Know thyself.” The temple was built in the 20th century
BCE. They understood human nature then, perhaps better than we do now. The real
journey of a lifetime is the one we travel within. Growing into our true selves
and understanding exactly who we are in our fullness takes us to a place unlike
any other. It is the journey each of us must make, and the only one that truly
matters.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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