The Essential Journey of Self-Discovery - Part 2

At what point in a person’s life do what should count in life really matter?  This is not even a question to which there can be a universal answer, since no standards exist by which the right answer can even be determined.  How can there be when no agreement exists on the things that matter in life?  What matters to one doesn’t necessarily matter to another. One could, for example, assume that everyone agrees that all people have a right to live and breathe free air; or that everyone should be able to worship without being harassed, forcibly converted or killed by people who hate them; or that everyone deserves to love and be loved.  To my mind, none of these is so far fetched as to invite the disagreements that they do in our world.  Yet, the reality is that all around us are people who not only believe the contrary but actively deny others the right to live, worship freely and love who they love.  Among the tragedies of this reality is not only that such people exist but that they, mostly adults, teach younger members of their families and communities the same values of hate and destructiveness that define their own existence.  This fact makes it difficult to hope for a world in which peace, genuine love and mutual understanding reign over malice, bigotry and killings of the other.  Why?  The reason is because children who are taught to hate cannot become loving adults unless a very rare supernatural experience occurs at some point in their lives.  Generally, hateful children grow into bigoted adults who bear false witness against those who they hate, deny them opportunities and/or kill them.

Perhaps the question to ask is: To what extent can one continue to hope as one lives with a sense of history and embraces the blessings of aging?  Aging confers on one the ability to celebrate life’s continuity in the face of challenges and realities over which every human is powerless.  However, aging also represents an accumulation of history that constitutes the main building blocks of a person’s life.  Thanks to the image and memories that are formed by those blocks, aging positions the older person in a place where he/she does not only look back at the history of the life lived but can also, if he or she chooses to engage his/her abilities, get a glimpse into a future yet to come.  This is possible because, not only does history not exist in a vacuum, it also informs the future.  It is in this context that the aphorism of the old philosopher, George Santayana can be examined and understood - that "Those Who Do Not Learn From History Are Doomed To Repeat It”.

The process of self-discovery is a walk in which every individual should probably engage at some point in his or her life.  It requires a certain degree of  self-consciousness and a realization that one does not have everything, does not know everything and has not produced everything that one is capable of.  Once engaged, the process of self-discovery is a very personal journey whose end the human mind cannot possibly determine from the beginning.  For this reason, a very high degree of open-mindedness and questioning is required for a successful walk. The hope is that among the eventual outcomes of this journey would be increased understanding and acceptance of self and others, higher levels of knowledge, an ability to understand and listen to an expressed challenge of orthodoxy and a deeper ability to genuinely and passionately love self and others - even those that one might ordinarily consider impossible to love.  At this point in one’s life, the ability to embrace and promote good is palpable and the willingness to challenge and shun bad is not only sincere but is effortless and consistent in its display. We cannot be as selfless, open and loving toward others as we ought to be unless we know and embrace who we are at a much deeper level.

If we can each become the same person in private that people see in public, if we can understand and accept that we are neither in fact superior or inferior to others, if we can love genuinely and embrace our own infallibility and work to make ourselves better humans, then we may actually be on our journey to self discovery. So let it be said of us!

The Essential Journey of Self-Discovery - Part 1

In my subconscious quest for self-discovery, I have learned how little I know about my own life. While I know the history of my life, as I would assume that most people do, and the memorable circumstances that define that history, I now understand that I only know pockets of what my subconscious has registered as the significant events of my life. Therefore, I ponder a little about questions that some might argue would be relevant only if the potential value could be of great significance.  But how do I know what the potential value might be if I paid no attention to the questions that my mind ponders? 

What about those events in my life that I do not know or do not recall?  Are they insignificant or do other people who know and can recall some of those aspects of my life use those aspects to define me?  Doesn’t that therefore mean that there is something actually normal in what we tend to complain about, that people judge us unfairly based on little or no information that they have about us?  In other words, people will never know all about us, but they will always base their assessments of us on partial information - and that is okay, since we do not truly know all about ourselves either.  If I asked someone who knows me well for their impressions of me (what sort of person he/she thinks I am), chances are that what I would hear the person say about me would be things that I was not thinking or had never even thought of about myself.  Does that mean that the person is wrong in his/her assessment of me?  Perhaps not; nor does it mean that the person is accurate because who I truly am is much more than the product of a simple reflective exercise.

What we think we know about ourselves and others may be no more than just a glance, which we then amplify into an image that never truly tells the complete story of our existence and/or who we are.  We are able to market ourselves and others as good, bad, superior or inferior based on the images that we have created that may or may not be wholly true about ourselves and others.  What is really true is that our life stations are often determined by circumstances over which we have no control. We are not always successful just because we work harder than others but often because some circumstances align in our favor to help make us so. For example, we have no power to stop time or to determine what people would cross our paths in life.  Yet, the impact of time and connections and inter-connectedness (or lack thereof) in the life of every living creature cannot be overemphasized.  A year goes and another comes as one day folds and gives way to the next, then one week followed by another, and a month after the one before it.  We live, not because we are special and do great things, but because we are beneficiaries of grace bigger than us.  I know this because I am a product of that grace, a fact that makes me feel no greater or less than anyone else and, yet a fact that I feel confers on me responsibilities beyond what would otherwise be my own human and natural desires for self-aggrandizement.