Imagine That
Being who we really are
Journal: 13 December, 2024, morning
I so admire people who can gracefully wear those artfully arranged scarves. You know, the ones that look so carelessly thrown around their shoulders, somehow ending up looking like a fashion magazine shoot in progress.
Some people just have this innate sense of casually done style. Not fashion, but style, which is a totally different thing. Do they learn this? Or does it just come with the overall genetic package, like 20-20 vision, or having perfect pitch, or an amazing jump shot?
Gifts. Nothing we earn, just gifts of the genetic lottery. I’m thinking about that this morning. People who create, seemingly out of nothing but their own heads. The imagination, the having a knack for a particular thing. It’s like magic to the rest of us, because it’s literally outside our ability to comprehend how they are able to do that. A few lines written, using the same words available to all of us, but choosing the few words that cast a spell over us and which we remember years later, with a pang of the heart. A few lines quickly drawn on paper, catching in seconds the essence of a person’s face, and self.
There are so many ways we are distinctly our own unique selves, each of us having the ability to do things no one else can, in exactly our own way. If only we had more courage to openly be those unique selves. If only we were more accepting and embracing of other people’s unique selves. If only other people welcomed and celebrated our unique selves.
Why do we cling to conformity so tightly?
I know why, of course. It’s as old as tribal anything. Safety in sameness, fear of rejection and the loss of that safety because the fear is based on hard lived experience. People say “Be yourself!” and then severely punish you when you dare to actually do that.
Don’t shake your head at me now, because you know this is reality. Be yourself, but not *that much* yourself.
Well.
If I could give you one gift this Christmas, it would be the gift of exploring who you really authentically are, in your deepest self, and the courage to be YOU. Truly and honestly and openly you. We are missing so much richness in our world—richness that we can’t begin to imagine, richness that we’ll never know—because so many of us are living other people’s ideas of who we should be.
Imagine that.
#journalingalife