I am grateful tonight for having a sense of knowing who I am. I had a conversation earlier today with a young person who is really still sorting that out. It’s an occupational regularity when one works on a college campus and spends any time at all around young people between the ages of 17 and 24. You’re bound to run into a lot of people who don’t really know themselves very well. I hasten to add, however, that this phenomenon isn’t solely the domain of the traditional college-aged young person; I’ve talked with a variety of thirty- and fortysomethings who also don’t seem to have everything about themselves all figured out either. I was talking to just such a person this morning who informed me that he couldn’t wait until he was 60 because then people would stop asking him things about his life and why he had or hadn’t done the things they’d expected out of him by now.
Even as I approach the nearer side of 60 myself I can’t say that I have it all figured out either; but I definitely know more about and am more comfortable with who I am as I’ve gotten older. I think that has grown out of the various things I’ve been through in my life that I’ve allowed to teach me rather than break me. It’s taken me a long time to learn some lessons, and much of my self knowledge has come through intentional study and prayer. It’s not self knowledge in a narcissistic way. To me it’s about learning life lessons that can perhaps help someone else as they are asking themselves questions about who they are and what they want to be about in the world. It’s one of the reasons I found my way into higher education, interacting with students and life coaching, helping clients seek and find answers from within themselves.
I keep going back to the line from the Mary Chapin Carpenter song, “Jubilee” in which she describes sings “we’re all like frail boats on the sea.” That’s how I feel about us humans. We’re wonderful, beautiful and sometimes fragile, delicate creatures. My conversations with people, my observations of them, my excavations of my own life bring me back to the idea that we all just want to be known, to be seen and acknowledged, loved and accepted for who we are (as soon as we figure out who that is.) The longer I live and the more people I interact with and see, the more convinced I am of our innate desire to connect with other humans. And connect deeply, not at superficial levels.
I am grateful that I learned early to ask myself pretty deep questions about life, about who I am and how I got to be here, about what I was going to do out in the world. I definitely didn’t have the answers, but asking the questions set me on a life path that while it has had some pretty interesting and wild twists and turns has nonetheless landed me in a good place. I still have more questions than answers, but as Rilke says, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.” Sounds like good advice to me. I think I’ll stick with that and see where it takes me next.
