Am I flawed, or fabulous? Mixed messages about being enough keep limbo alive and well.
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But could it be I’m paying too much attention, perhaps in the wrong classrooms?
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I consider myself a reasonably attentive student of life. My curriculum may well pale beside others’, and I certainly can be a late bloomer, prone to repeat my share of lessons. But I trust that life offers to me what I’m most purposefully here to learn. I need only be seeking, open, honest, and committed to paying attention in class. But could it be I’m paying too much attention, perhaps in the wrong classrooms?
I’m nearly backflip-thrilled at the rise in messages of self-determined worth that I see becoming more common and defiant in social media spheres of late. Whether aimed at anti-bullying, non-discrimination, positive body or gender image, or simple, innate human value, these heartening reality checks on who or what defines the quality of our self-experience—and by extension, our experience of others—are beyond overdue.
Just one catch: If we’re too assuredly “enough” as we are then no one gets ahead by convincing us to buy into their enlarged or diminished versions of ourselves. Can the marketplace even bear for that little to be amiss in us? If we’re enough already, then the rest is but self-realization; wholeness revealed, not acquired. It’s shedding our stories of mistaken identity, not further accessorizing with the latest defining top-seller or viral vogue.
Someone, somewhere, needs me to know I’m incomplete without mastering the 8, 12 or 20 “secrets” to one form of ideal personhood or another.
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I hardly know which is more heavily invested in how I view myself—the entrepreneurial marketplace, or the marketplace of social consciousness and change, mingled though they can be. Someone, somewhere, needs me to know I’m incomplete without mastering the 8, 12 or 20 “secrets” to one form of ideal personhood or another. That juiciest gold, keeping me from living large. Those insider relationship wish lists silently coveted but not confessed. And, straining through the sidewalk cracks, also comes the occasional but increasing, “You are enough; yes, already! Go with you.”
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So which is it? Are we or aren’t we fundamentally “enough”? Are we truly ill-equipped, or just ill-informed? Though I’m as subject to traditional mind traps along life’s odyssey as anyone, my gut preference is to revisit the gift of how we’re created, not conditioned. What were we, from our first breath, fashioned to instinctually value? How far afield have we been coaxed, even defending those very steps or missteps? And if values inevitably shift, how much is purely natural, and how much is edited? Can we even begin to know?
Among all the better-you programs and those must-know lists that we may or may not care to suffer through, I offer this single, one-thing list which I maintain outshines them all …
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I’m powerfully struck by what near-death accounts and other metaphysical portrayals share as our timeless true nature: utter love, light, beauty, innocence, and possibility. Inexpressibly boundless. How, then, in this temporal realm can we possibly be less, beneath all cloaking spells of illusion and falsehood that we ourselves consciously or unconsciously agree to? More than any other, might that very same liberating lens for seeing both ourselves and others phenomenally unleash our grandest mortal wellness and good?
Among all the better-you programs and those must-know lists that we may or may not care to suffer through, I offer this single, one-thing list which I maintain outshines them all: Understood poorly or well, you are enough. Whatever we each must unlearn to own and to live that recognition, changing classrooms if needed, then by all means, bring it. You are, beautifully and profoundly, enough; just as delivered, designed, and ever-unfolding. Hardly because I or anyone else might say so, but because you’re so miraculously even here in the first place.
And yes, this is first and foremost my note to self.
May we all rejoin our most timeless truth, and so doing, boldly embody our inborn, radiant gifthood anew.
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Photo: Unsplash