“Now I become myself.
It’s taken time, many years, and places.
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Work other people’s faces…
— May Sarton
Author and activist Parker Palmer writes that vocation does not mean a goal to pursue. It means finding one’s own heart and setting it free.
I love to fantasize that I have the heart and soul of a flower; I’m born, live, blossom, and keep growing until life takes me away. I’m me, and I just recently learned who I am and who I want to be. I hope I have time.
In every school where I was taught, from my first words to the last in classrooms, I was taught to listen to everything and everyone but myself, to form my goals, take my cues, and seek my values about living from the people, powers, and adults around me.
I grew up with other people defining my life and instructing me on what it should be. Some days, it feels like everyone in the world wants me to think like them, even if they don’t think at all. Labels can do that to people. I promise never to wear one to shut down my mind.
Where did we learn we have the right and wisdom to tell others how to live?
There is so much noise in our culture.
How can we understand our own lives, in which we are assaulted daily with a tsunami of information we don’t need that can’t help us? Perhaps they do it to distract us. There is nothing more dangerous to them than people who think for themselves; they are quickly labeled, pushed to the edges, ridiculed, or discarded. Everyone must have a label to feel safe and be safe.
The people who make the most noise have nothing to say.
The people who make the most sense make no noise and are ignored lest they be believed. They are also taught to fight and hate one another. Everyone has a label with nothing on it but color.
As I grow older and learn something about myself, I realize how long it took to become the person I have always been, not the person I was told to be. I see now that I masked myself in faces that were not mine.
It’s simple. For better or worse, I am learning to listen to me.
The search to uncover my true identity is underway and will never stop. How can it be? We are plants and flowers of a kind, growing and dying. This is the seed of vocation, not work: I love what I do.
Palmer writes that it’s the true self within every human being, the real identity that patiently waits to be freed.
A beautiful metaphor, Jon, that we are flowers that grow, bloom, wither and die. No flower stands alone well, it needs others around it for support. This rugged individualism that our country seems to worship just doesn’t work for humans. Compassion, love, community, all of these come from learning to listen to ourselves, and helping others to do the same. Uplifting rather than tearing down – this is how humans feel safe enough to grow and expand. All else is simply mere survival. Once I felt safe enough to be my true self, I naturally wanted to help others. I see the ones who are tearing others down as lost souls. Sadly, they can do a lot of damage to others with their anger and hatred. My counselor has said many times that those of us who have healed our wounds and have the tools of compassion and love, have the most responsibility to respond well to the anger and hatred around us.
Lovely. Now I can picture you, in the beautiful green fields of Cambridge, the soupy heat, the narrow roads to ancient towns.
Barbara
Thanks for those words, Jon. I tend to think of myself, at this point, as the autumn leaf, not quite brown yet, but getting there. It’s a beautiful time of life and worth every moment.