"Our deepest
fear
is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest
fear
is that we are
powerful
beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most
frightens
us."
... Marianne Williamson
"I don't want to get to the end of my life and find I lived just the
length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well."
... Diane Ackerman
This essay,
Distraction
/ Consolation: Getting Away From
Who I Am,
is the companion piece to
I am indebted to Garth Luxton who inspired this conversation.
I take an inventory of my life from time to time. It's an inventory of
my
actions.
It's an inventory of what I'm doing. It's an inventory of what I'm up
to. It's an inventory of my occupations (which includes a
sub-inventory of my
inner
dialog if you will). It's an inventory of what I'm currently
engaging with. For the purposes of this inventory, whatever I'm
engaging with either falls into the category of being an
authentic
expression of
who I am
in
the world,
or it falls into the category of being a distraction from being
who I am
in
the world
(which includes a sub-category of consolations for being thwarted from
being
who I am
in
the world).
What's not quite so easy to distinguish for my inventory are the
distractions and the consolations I succumb to from time to time. It's
hard catching them. It's even harder telling the
truth
about them. They're
slippery
and pernicious. I say
"slippery
and pernicious" because they're cleverly disguised as
authentic
engagements when in fact what they really are, are pulls
ie they're really skews if you will (pulling me away from
being
who I am
in
the world,
skewing me away from being
who I am
in
the world).
There are any number of them which distract me from being
who I am
ie which beguile me with good reasons to notauthentically
be
who I am.
To be clear, I'm making no excuses for my
actions
when I'm being distracted and / or being consoled. Whether I like them
or not, I still take responsibility for them and for all of it all the
time anyway. Those distracted and / or consoled behaviors per se
however, don't hold any
interest
for me. What does
interest
me (as soon as I can distinguish it clearly) is their pull, their skew.
I notice there's more of a natural pull in their direction than there
is in the direction of being
authentic.
Now that'sinteresting
to me. Being
authentic
is something I have to generate ongoingly. It's harder. There's no
natural pull toward it. Yet distraction and / or consolation on the
other hand, have a natural pull toward them. So it's easier. That's
veryinteresting
...
Sometimes I find myself
wondering
whether our lives wouldn't be much easier to manage if there was a
pull, a skew toward being
authentic
instead. But there isn't. It seems to
work
the other way around. The pull, the skew is toward being
inauthentic,
toward being distracted, toward being consoled. I assume it's because
being
inauthentic
comes from life's
mechanized
drive to survive, whereas being
authentic
comes from and requires ie calls for being
creative,
for making it up out of
nothing.
At least in my assumption, it appears we human beings are thrown to be
this way - and it
interests
me that we're thrown to be this way. Left to its own devices when I
don't impose
authenticity
and
integrity,
my life would appear to
devolve
all by itself toward distraction and / or consolation ie getting away
from
who I am
(it's pulled, skewed that way), which is to say getting away from
authenticity
and
integrity.
When I say that, by the way, I'm not
complaining.
Rather than being a complaint, it's my stone cold, flat footed
observation
of the fact that unchecked, I'm pulled to go that way ie that
unchecked, I'm skewed to go that way. By the same token it's also my
recognition of the fact that the way I must go if there's going to be
authenticity
and
integrity
in my life, is I have to generate it. Given the preponderance of
evidence and the choice I have in the matter, the latter way is the way
I go.