Be
By: Timothy O'Neill
Tags: Life Lessons, Self, Inspiration, Nonfiction, Mental Health

Be

Or not?

Image by ANThy from Pixabay

We have the innate willingness to be what we are. This sounds simple enough, but is it really? Most animals are more mindful than the average adult. They exist in the eternal present, untroubled by regret or worry. And most animals do not have existential debates with themselves over who they are, why they are, what they mean to other people, what they mean to themselves, and how they should think, feel and act in modern society. Animals are free to be exactly who they are. They don’t make mistakes or have failures because in every moment they are acting in accordance with their essential nature. They exist, and that is enough for them and enough for the world. What is our nature and how do we align ourselves to it? Is that even a worthwhile enterprise? Would that bring us closer to our primitive selves or closer to our true selves, unencumbered by opinion, expectation or bias? I would contend that it is in our nature to reason, to feel, to learn, to play, to explore, to love and to create. In truth, I would say that we are vibrant, boundless beings made up of so many synergizing and conflicting qualities that nailing down what is in our nature is a quixotic quest. I took a shortcut based on my beliefs and my life experience. If it holds water, it means that whenever we are doing these things we are acting congruently with the qualities that make us most human. We are living lives of meaning and purpose. We are answering the question that is never posed to our animal brethren: why?

The more we deviate from our natural state the more fragmented and stressed and chaotic and adrift we feel. We know something feels off, but we can’t pinpoint what that something is. This is when it is beneficial to get back in touch with our emotions and see what they are trying to tell us, because emotions convey just as much information to us as our reasoning mind. In Dialectical Behavior Therapy they call balancing your emotion mind and your reasoning mind, wise mind. We are using our wise mind when we learn from our emotions. At times, the answer to why we feel the way we feel is obvious. We are stressed because we are trying to survive the holidays during the pandemic. We feel fragmented because there are too many things vying for our attention, and we may be neglecting some of the practices that used to help make us feel whole. We may feel chaotic because of all the things going to hell that are out of our control. We may feel adrift because we have limited contact with our loved ones, or we recently left a job or a relationship. In those situations the chain of cause and effect is easy to follow. But then there are the times when we are sad and lonely even when things are going well and we’re in good company.

What is this sadness and this loneliness trying to tell us? What is it motivating us to do? Perhaps we’re keeping our hearts closed and not giving and receiving love. Perhaps we’re not creating anything, and this can apply to creating new hobbies, thought patterns, beliefs or attitudes as equally as writing a novel or baking a pie. We’re creative creatures. We bring dreams to fruition. Isn’t that amazing? We have the power to take an image in our mind’s eye and manifest it into tangible reality. There is a special power in that that cannot be overstated. Or maybe we’re not learning to heal our wounds and we are constantly picking scabs and these scabs become infected and soon we are septic with sadness. Now is the time to learn and to grow. The loneliness may be stemming from the fact that we are unable to be emotionally vulnerable, because of the profundity of our sadness. The two may be tied up in one another. In any case, our emotions are letting us know that we are acting at variance with our nature and when we do this we suffer. And everyone does this. And everyone suffers.

When we were a child we weren’t analyzing and dissecting our every movement, our every reaction, our every thought and feeling. We were being perfectly who we were. Some might say that maturing and taking on responsibility forces one to carefully consider every aspect of their actions, their feelings, their thoughts and their speech. But sometimes we pay too much attention to the arbitrary authority of our own minds. They should not rule us. We should clear out the clutter, minimize the negative ruminations, let go of our fears, worries and resentments and decide what foundational principles we are going to operate under. Know your core beliefs. Know your values. Make yourself unshakeable. This way you have a moral compass with which to navigate even the roughest of life’s seas. We’re no longer children, and we don’t have to pretend to be, but if we can rebalance ourselves in a way that better expresses who we truly are, then we can be perfectly who we are, without guilt, shame or doubt.

The road is long. There will always be setbacks. There will be times when we don’t live up to our own standards or what we imagine society’s standards to be. We will feel less-than. We will feel like we don’t belong. We will feel like we’re not doing enough, like we haven’t earned our seat at the table. You have, I promise you. Simply by having the courage to get up out of bed and face the day you are validating yourself, announcing yourself, proclaiming your inherent worth to the world. Because even though you doubt it at times, you are inherently worthwhile and no one and nothing can ever take that away from you. So I would invite you to be, be perfectly you.