“Your analysis of your life and its failures has the ring of truth since congruent with your self-preoccupation.”
This comment appeared unbidden on my blog. It evoked a great deal of thought and reflection about what occupies my life…and what should.
My first reaction was colored by fear and humiliation, with various shades of self-recrimination. I have a deep-seated, private fear that too much of my life has been about, well, my life.
As I continued to reflect, I recalled that preoccupy means to occupy your mind and life with one thing before you live into and contemplate others. If self-preoccupation means to focus on self before others, at first blush, a person who does that would seem to lack humility and regard for others. Certainly that is worthy of self-condemnation!
However, just after I received this missive from cyberspace, I began reading Martin Buber’s “I and Thou.” Early in the work Buber says “The basic word I-You can only be spoken with one’s whole being.”
Perhaps I am a slow learner, but much of what I know of who I am, and who I am capable of being, has come to me in the most recent years of my life. As I have come to discover fragments that lay shy and hidden for nearly half a century, admittedly, I have spent many hours reflecting on, and writing about, the magnitude, boundaries, and meaning of those newly-exposed facets of self.
Is it possible, I began to wonder, that without sufficient occupation with self before others, I am incapable of speaking with my whole being? Is it possible that, without some amount of self-preoccupation I am speaking largely from a false self? Do I need to know self before I can be in relation to others in the sense Buber suggests?
What I have come to believe is that the more I come to know who I am, and of what I am capable, the more easily I can let go of self-preoccupation and relax into being who I was always meant to become.