“One of the most private things in the world is an egg before it’s broken.”
M.F.K. Fisher
Sometimes a writer turns an observation into a phrase so astonishingly simple it becomes remarkably profound. Indeed, most of our lives are invisible. Who we really are is known only to ourselves. Our thoughts, feelings, perceptions and memories occur in our inner world, yet they form the most significant part of our lives – they create our definition of ourselves. As children we learn who we are through our senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. This shell of identity is painstakingly created over the course of our lives. By the time we’re adults, most of us have lived with an enormous disparity between what we’re like on the inside and how we appear on the outside, not to mention what we think others are like and what we think others think we’re like.
Our modern culture values the impersonal, not the personal. Since this is not helpful in developing real insight, how do we discover who we are now? I believe to understand who we are now we have to be willing to crack ourselves wide open and throw out all of our preconceptions. Most of who we think we are today was decided by the person we were in the past, a person with less experience and less knowledge. The younger me doesn’t know the older me at all. Is the person most well-suited to be deciding how I spend my time now, the person I was in the past?
The truth is, we invent ourselves from one moment to the next all the time without even realizing it – it’s an intimate, alchemical dance of moments strung across time. To understand that everything is changing and nothing exists beyond this moment is transcendental. We are shaped by our thoughts. We are not bound by ideas we thought were immutable. We can create a life that’s full of patience, love and compassion, instead of one that’s full of anger, worry and fear. The Sufi poet, Rumi said, “Resurrection is now, every moment a new beauty.”
The beauty of the transience of life fills me with heart-rending poignancy. To find beauty and contentment in ordinary moments is extraordinary – each day contains an unlimited supply. It’s almost impossible not to feel satisfied and enriched. Just by stopping what we’re doing, and unraveling the complicated tapestry of our lives, we’ll emerge, one new breath at a time, one new step at a time. Only by breaking out of the safety of our old shells will we know who we truly are. What a wonderful gift.
