Life consists of learning to live on one’s own, spontaneous, freedom: to do this; one must recognize what is one’s own: to be familiar with oneself and to resist insofar as is safe and possible the many people who would tell you to change, or what to be and how to be.

There are lots of them, and they appear at every stage of life, wherever people try to be free.

Identity is one of the most precious things human beings are given. I’ve felt my whole life that I’ve had to fight to keep people from taking my identity from me or trying to get me to change it.

It’s time to stop fighting and live.

I get in trouble because I have taken the problem to learn who I am very seriously and understand what I can offer the world around me. I don’t permit other people to tell me what that is.

But a lot of people don’t like it.

I give thanks every morning for what I have and begin every day of life in gratitude. It is the best way I have ever started my days.

I want to know what the world can offer me. Having found out, I have to return the favor and make my showing genuine, honest, and valuable.

Every day, one person or another tells me to change or urges me to be someone I am not. I never fool myself into thinking I am perfect. But I will always be me.

The purpose of education is to show a person how to define themselves authentically and spontaneously so they can relate to the world they will one day have to face.

I didn’t learn that lesson in school or from adults.

I learned to want to be like everyone else and to be ashamed of the things that made me different, of who I was. I lost my identity or hid it; no one else seemed to like it.

Today,  I cherish the freedom to be myself, sometimes too much. I’m getting my identity back; I’m learning to live fully.

The world is made up of the people who are fully alive in it, writes Thomas Merton.

That is, he says, of the people who can be themselves in life and can enter into a living, loving, and fruitful relationship with one another.

As we can see from the news every day, the world is also made up of other people who are not fully alive and waste their time with anger, plotting for power money, who lie and live in perpetual grievance.

You can spot these people quickly; they are eager to show themselves. They live in outrage; they are always angry about something. That is, to me, no way to live fully. If they are not careful, they’ll burn their insides out.

The world, he adds, desperately needs the people in it to be more thoroughly and more humanly alive: that is to say, better able to make a lucid and conscious – and honest –  use of their freedom.

That is not easy to do. There is no end to people telling us how to live our lives; they come over the hills like zombies who can’t be killed.

They are threatened by identity, as they dread and hate individuality; they can’t abide by what is different.

I embrace Merton’s big idea: “Basically, this freedom must consist first of all in the capacity of people choose their own lives, to find themselves on the deepest possible level.”

Superficial freedom – to wander here or there, taste this or choose distractions, is simply a sham, a sorry excuse for a life, he insists.

Merton argues that anyone who refuses or is unwilling to ask the risk of self-discovery is not free.

I’m not clear enough, or perhaps strong enough to tell other people what to do. I don’t have that most common of genes. One graduates from the actual school of life, says Merton, rising from the dead.

He’s talking about souls, not bodies.

“Learning to be oneself means learning to die to live. The inmost soul is naked.”

In my own life, I’ve come to understand what Merton means.

To live, I had to put to death my old self, my old way of looking at the world, my old grievances and obsessions and misunderstandings, the chips on my shoulder.

Of course, I didn’t get all of them, but I am chipping away. I have faith in me.

I had to give rebirth to myself again and again, and this is a process ongoing still; I’m not sure I’ll ever get to the end of it. The naked soul hangs on, but I get stronger all the time.

Stripping life down to the basics and rebuilding and letting go – stripping it down to the root where life and death are in some ways equal – is where freedom begins.

And this is where I started to feel it and live. My life changed. I think I know what it means for me to live fully, even if I’m not always there.

It means, if necessary, killing off the old self.

The point of freedom is not to harm or wound or kill, not to exploit or succumb to greed, not to destroy, not to compete, because there is no longer any reason to fear death, failure, or poverty.

This is not a monastic or theological idea. It depends on what one wants from life.

You can’t miss or mourn what you don’t have and don’t need.

People don’t like this nakedness, Merton warns.

Best to hide it, he says.

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Photo: Blackout. We had one tonight.