Who Am I Becoming?

Picture taken by me in Sausalito 2014.

Chaos is an inherent part of change. The world is changing.

There is much chaos in personal and social life.

The personal chaos might look simple to you, perhaps you’ve been asked to pick something up, or there’s an event you want to attend, and you’re worried about Covid and the potential risks it places on your family and yourself.

Then there are the more complicated aspects of life like understanding your relationship with death, uncertainty, ancestry, the pain you felt in chidhood.

These moments happen, little and often. Tension can build when we’re not making these small decisions.

We might feel adrift in life, never really feeling a sense of control or feeling like an imposter.

A life-changing perspective change on my journey was to ask myself this question:

“Who am I becoming?”

Through change, we can lose sight of the ‘solid’ edges of our personality, or even our body (if it’s a harrowing experience with dis-ease), things get chaotic, and the mind is blinded.

The blindness comes from a survival focus that rightly kicks in in some cases. Survival mode is excellent to get you out of a tight spot when you know what you need automatically, the senses narrow and heighten, autopilot kicks in, and the body goes into one of three modes: fight, flight or freeze.

The challenge for modern humanity is that we perceive threats in society daily.

Society needs us to connect cohesively for it to function. All culture relies on a paradigm or model that is subconsciously agreed to by all citizens. Even if you’re a disruptor character like me, you can agree that the thing you’re disrupting is agreed.

In these moments of turbulence, the question becomes an insight into a longer arc of time. It moves the awareness out of narrow survival and becomes open-minded and developmental.

The imagination shuts down in survival mode. The body prioritises survival mechanisms like running or shifting all the energy to the vital organs in case we need to fight. In these moments, we only have access to the integrated learning that we have done up until this point.

“Who am I becoming?” allows us to activate the imagination, to see ourselves in five years, and reach towards whatever it is feels right for that person.

I’m speaking primarily to people who feel stuck in a rut here. This is a way to unleash yourself from the behaviours you routinely do but are dissatisfied with.

A learning, student, mindset.

I don’t mean student as most of you might imagine; university, getting wasted on alcohol, microwave meals etc. I mean student like the Roman Stoics describe. Constantly open to life and knowing more of the self.

An excellent reframe in times of chaos.

Something to align to when making the next step forward, and forward we must go in life.

Ideally, we step with presence, centred in ourselves and who we are becoming.

In grateful service.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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