Essence

The last few days I have spent a good amount of time thinking about my essence, about what makes me, me.

It started after a conversation I had with a dear friend. We were talking about accidents. Accidents like the adolescent boy in our area who just last week was playing hockey and got checked in just the wrong place so that now he is paralyzed from the waist down. Accidents like my friend’s previous law-school classmate who was in a horrible car crash that left her brain damaged, including loss of her short-term memory. Accidents like when a friend’s twenty-year-old brother fell off of some scaffolding to his death.

Our discussion made me think about a line from The Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer: “I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be along with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.”

Like the boy, who lost hockey… who is he once the majority of what people defined him as, fell away? Who would I be, if all else fell away? If you looked past being a Youth Minister, a middle-class suburban woman, a dog owner, a traveler, a theologian, an ultimate frisbee player, a writer….. who am I then?

Because the truth is, at the end of the day, none of those things really matter. Those are things I do.. and they’re important to me… but they aren’t who I am. They don’t define me. They don’t encompass my identity.

I’m the one my friends send in first at an awkward social engagement. I’m chatty; I like meeting new people. I like people in general. I’m easygoing and not easily angered. I’m empathetic and compassionate. I’m bad at saying “no” and I like to feel needed. I believe that the Divine is present everywhere and in everyone and it pains me to think of the ways that people and the earth are hurt, neglected, misused and abused every single day. I am made of stardust.

It terrifies me to think about what I would do if I was in an accident and became paralyzed. That sort of damage would severely change my expectations about my future: about the sort of relationships I hope to have, about the sort of work I hope to do. But, it terrifies me more to think about what would happen if I was in an accident that somehow altered my personality in some severe way. What if people looked at me and thought: this is not her, this is not her the way we remembered her, she has lost herself.

The interesting thing is that we don’t need to suffer through a tragedy in order to lose ourselves. We can lose ourselves on a daily basis if we aren’t paying attention. We lose ourselves for success, for honor, for love. We lose ourselves as we let other people’s expectations of who we should be or could be take precedence over who we truly are. Sometimes we even forget ourselves completely.

That’s why it’s important to take a pause every once in awhile; to breathe and reevaluate. Sometimes we need to remember what makes us, us. Sometimes we need to ask ourselves, “Do I like the company I keep in the empty moments?”.

Sometimes, we need to quiet the noise of the world so that we can hear the wisdom of our own being.