When are the times in my life when the subject doesn't arise? When do questions like "Who am I?" "What am I doing here?" "Where am I going?" "Where have I been?" become irrelevant?
I made a list and here it is, in no particular order.
When I'm in love.
When I'm wholly involved in creative work.
When I dance or sing or play or pray or am entranced by nature.
When I'm communicating with close friends.
When I'm taking care of others who depend on me and whom I love.
When there is a crisis of some kind which demands immediate and specific action.
At times like those, I am who I am, no question about it. So now I leave this topic, wondering if wondering about identity only happens when none of the above circumstances exist?
Tomorrow I'll announce the topic for August.
UPDATE: LAST-MINUTE CONTRIBUTIONS FOR JULY
Beth said...
Am I too late? It's still July, barely...
- Like Dick, I've always had a strong sense of knowing who I am, so this question is a hard one for me to comment upon. My identity doesn't seem mysterious, in fact it seems logical. Knowing who I am doesn't, of course, mean that I've always been able to act on it fully, often because of other people's expectations or needs, but gradually I've found that what really matters is knowing who you are at your core, and then you don't lose it quite so much when in difficult situations or living with limitations.
What is mysterious to me is not so much identity as being. "I AM," said Yahweh, and we can say it to ourselves, and never understand entirely how that could be possible, and yet be absolutely clear that we in fact "ARE," and we are ourselves and no other. My explorations and wonderings about identity as an adult have been more along the lines of who I am in relationship to all the others who are, and what that might mean. It's a question of becoming more fully myself, and at the same time surrendering to the knowledge that we are all parts of one another; I certainly exist in my own individual physicality, and in my own consciousness, but I'm most fully myself when engaged in the ego-less activities Natalie mentions in her list. Moving more deeply into that paradox will be the continuing work of the next years....
Posts
One last thing about identity...
Sufis teach that a human soul is a drop in the Ocean of the Divine One. Once it is realised that the lover is the same substance as the Beloved, all "identity" ceases, and both "become" what they truly are.
"But do not think that the drop alone becomes the Ocean— the Ocean, too, becomes the drop!" Jelaluddin Rumi
July 31, 2007 12:00 PM