Note: I recently cofacilitated a Lifelong Learning course on “Awe.” For the final session I challenged the participants to write something inspired by our five weeks together. Here is what I wrote: Who Am I?
Who am I, and what will remain of me after I am gone? These questions are not for us to answer, and yet, we long to know. We find partial answers in moments when we open ourselves to the world with vulnerability and authenticity.
I once gave a presentation in which I allowed myself the gift of vulnerability. I asked a series of, at least for me, deeply important questions.
I wondered aloud if I had the wisdom and audacity to live into the miracle I was brought into this world to be. Atoms and molecules dispersed across the Universe, coalesced to form me. Why?
I wondered what would it take for me to know that who I am today is enough, so I can stop chasing the person I think I need to become?
I asked if I might always see others as beloved. If I am unable to see others as beloved, how can I expect them to see the beloved in me?
I asked if it was possible to be with you in your pain and sorrow without trying to fix it, make it better, or make it go away? Pain and sorrow are, after all, portals to wisdom that we dare not close too soon.
Neil Postman wrote “Children are the living messages we send to a future we will not see.” What are the messages, conscious and unconscious, I am sending to a future I will not see? What are children learning from my presence? And am I being the messages my foremothers and forefathers hoped to send into the future they no longer see?
My final question that evening was going to be, “Have I made the world a better place?” In the end, however, I asked “Were others able to make the world better because we traveled this road together?”
I sit here in this very moment, in awe of the people in my presence. The gift I have received from all of you has been your willingness to show up with authenticity and vulnerability. I am always humbled when people find the courage to pull back a veil behind which so many of us hide. We hide out of necessity to protect the child within who is frightened by a world that can be hurtful, intimidating and oft-times violent.
But, we hide at our own peril, because the world is in desperate need of us. It is our softest, most vulnerable fragments that have the greatest ability, not to make the world safe, but to help others try to understand the beauty that lies within its confusing, often disturbing, sometimes crushing, complexity.
The Persian mystic Hafiz once said, “I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.”
In the end, I am best able to witness an astonishing light within me whenever I am able to help others witness the astonishing light of their own being?
So, who am I? Who have I tried to be? I often fail, but I strive to create spaces that invite and challenge others to show up, authentic and vulnerable, and begin to see the astonishing light of their own being.
These are difficult words to say out loud because a voice of denial screams, “You do that so haphazardly and so poorly, how can you even begin to claim such a thing?” But, here, in this place, in this moment, I choose to quiet that voice of denial, and say, “That is who I am.”
You choose to say “cut the crap”. A misinterpreted, often downplayed, expression of love and self power. Bravo.