Finding yourself
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
George Bernard Shaw
“No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942, translated from French by Lewis Galantière
Finding yourself is a popular concept touted by the tourism industry and subscribed to by countless people. I believe the concept is misguided but the feeling is real enough.
Sometimes you get swept up in a tide of choices that, over time, carry you far out to sea. One day you realise that you’ve lost sight of the shore and no longer remember in which direction it lies. Now you’re a person that keeps swimming because that’s what you do.
Sometimes a meteor comes along and knocks you out of orbit. You get broken or changed somehow and it’s not how you wanted things to be. It happens so fast that you have no idea where you’re headed or even whether it’s where you want to go.
That’s when you feel like you need to find yourself.
Only, whoever you are right now and whatever you’re doing IS you. You are fully capable of saying these things and acting like you have been. You can’t externalise that and say it’s not who you are. There is no previous self lain dormant all these years or a new self behind a waterfall in Fiji waiting to be ‘found’.
Whether you’re swimming in circles or careening out of control, if you don’t like the current version of you then it’s time to change. You are not subject to the tide or the meteor unless you choose to be. Whoever you were yesterday or are today, you don’t have to be tomorrow. Whoever you have been, you can be again.
Look at your options. Weigh your decisions in light of who you want to be. The tide of your choices will then take you where you want to go.
L
Muchness 