yourself

You have to be yourself. 

You.  Have to.  Be yourself.

You have to be.  Yourself.

You have to be yourself.  You can never authentically be anything until you understand that.  To be yourself you have to know yourself.  To know yourself, you have to try different things.  You have to strive for something.  You have to eff up.  You have to give yourself room, latitude, permission to grab something that calls to your deepest place. Try, strive, mess it all up, assess yourself with brutal honesty, and do it again differently with what you have learned from your experience.  You have to be brave to step out.  You can be careful, but sometimes you just have to throw yourself into it, really give it a full-on edge-of-insanity whirl.  “A man’s gotta know his limitations,” goes the old movie quote.  For sure that goes for women, too.  A person has to know their limits, and the only way to do that is to answer that call from your deepest place with reckless abandon.

I’m not taking what God desires for you out of this discussion.  God made us, and we’re all His original ideas from the start.  Godless folks try unnaturally to keep God out of everything, and religious folks try to unnaturally insert God into everything.  Rule of thumb:  whether or not you believe in God, just shut up about it.  I’m talking about the human experience here, not Ministry or Marxism.  Living is learning how to use the tools in your bag to bring about the most contented outcome.  Whether or not you believe it was fate, God, or a roll of the cosmic dice that gave you your respective “bag of tools” is immaterial.

To be content…  Some call it happiness.  Some call it Zen.  Nirvana was a 90’s band that sang about smelling teen spirit, I think.  Paul of Tarsus wrote, in the first century A.D., that he had learned the secret of being content in every situation.  Rich, poor, favorable, refugee status, in every situation.  I like that.  He had to learn how.  Contentedness did not fall out of the tree of over religious zealots.  It did not come with a membership to the Free Masons.  Nor did he achieve it through any religious, political, or environmental ideology.  Being content, being happy is something you have to LEARN.  It’s like ‘Getting To Know Yourself 201.’ 

I know you religious folk are hyperventilating about now because you think I am trying to remove God from an article about being yourself.  No doubt you Godless folks are flipping out because I used an illustration out of the New Testament in the Bible. Track with me here:  If I go camping, and I do every chance I get, I go for many reasons- rest, restoration, rejuvenation, natural beauty therapy, to test my skills, etc.  When I am camping I am not reciting those goals a loud to myself or the world at large.  I am not reminding myself to breathe the air, or to smell the flowers, the pine scent, or the freshness of a cool breeze rising off the water next to the trail.  I am not proclaiming my meals to the forest creatures.  Is this an absurd enough picture?  The trees are there, and were long before me.  I do not have to proclaim their glory to revel in the things of nature.  The mountains I may be hiking through have been standing tall for thousands of years, and they are there for anyone to see.  Likewise, if you are all about God and going to church, etc., then be about it and shut your mouth.  God is no less God.  Everyone who is looking will see.  If you are all about…  not God… that will be quite obvious to anyone paying attention as well.  No one has to proclaim or shout any of that.  It will be obvious.  Living is not demanding others think, believe, or act as you.  Being yourself is finding what you think about all those questions, studying a little to make it valid in your own mind and to be able to give an answer if someone asks.  It’s going through life marking down questions and making notations in your mind about what you observe, tapping knowledgeable sources, and coming to some solid conclusions within your own consciousness.  Yeah, sorry Bible-thumper folks.  I don’t mean it to sound “new age-y.”  It is what it is.

Living contentedly is a learned skill, and it is parallel to knowing yourself and being yourself.  Tragically, so many succumb to the ambush of the environment they grew up in, society, their education, etc.  A really huge enemy to living contentedly and being yourself are expectations placed on you by others and/or you.  What do you know and how do you know it?  Was it drilled into you by your parish priest?  Your hyper-expressive Pentecostal pastor?  Your parents?  Your extended family?  The company you keep?  Expectations are fine, when there is a reason for them, reasons like you have discovered your love for business, studied it, practiced it, etc., and now you expect to see positive results from pushing in that direction.  But blind, traditional, familial expectations are a total drag and usually bind rather than liberate. Find out for yourself.  Yes, you can trust the people who know and love you. But do not take their word for it.  Go find out through observation, trial, and failure.   Don’t be afraid to “eff-up find out,” as my Gen-Xers are so fond of saying.