Who are you when all the layers are stripped down? The religion, the tribe, the job, the expectations, the conditioning, the roles you play, the choices you’ve made, the mistakes. When it’s all stripped away, what remains?
From the day we are born we are thrown into the river of life, and it carries us on its waves, relentlessly flowing forward, and after a time, we find ourselves on the river banks of who we have become. When we are young, we are unable to swim against the tide, but as we grow into adults we find that we can swim, but the river has already had its way.
When does one’s true self emerge from this relentlessly flowing river? A self defined by one’s own mind, free of a history that we at times had no control over. When do we pause to actually take an outsider view of who we have become and start to sort which parts are truly ours and which parts are from without?
“This is the greatest damn thing about the universe,” Henry Miller wrote in his magnificent meditation on the meaning of existence, “that we can know so much, recognize so much, dissect, do everything, and we can’t grasp it.” Paradoxically enough, the fragment of the universe we seem least equipped to grasp is the truth of who we ourselves are. Who are we, really, when we silence the ego’s shrill commands about who we should be, and simply listen to the song of life as it sings itself through us?
brainpickings.org
While reading Paul Kalanithi’s When breath becomes air (about a man who for a lot of his life contemplated meaning and death and who eventually came face to face with death when he was diagnosed with cancer in his 30s) I hoped that he had found the answers he was looking for and in so doing he would share them in his memoir.
What I found was not what i was looking for. I’ve always thought that death is one of those things that is sure to bring clarity. That maybe if i am reminded of my own mortality, if i am reminded that death is not as far fetched as i think then questions like who am i? will come into sharp focus and the answers will follow.
But it seems even if i knew how much time i had left on earth, what would follow would be confusion. What to do with that time? What would I prioritize? Would it be enough time to discover who i truly am or would i be forced to only finish the things I had already started? What truth would I live? Would I swim against the tide?
Paul writes “…everywhere I turned, the shadow of death obscured the meaning of any action.” He too struggled to define who he would be now that death was staring him in the face. Was he still a neurosurgeon? What was he to do with the limited time he had left? What should come first? Who would he be now?
When we silence the world, take a break from the ever flowing river of life, are we able to really find who we are outside of it all?
'two roads diverged...' 