As we come closer to September, I always begin systematically reviewing the story that I tell about my life. September is like the start of the new year for me. It has always been my time to begin making minor, sometimes major adjustments to my life and reflect meaningfully on what is working, and what is not.
Even though September no longer represents the start of a new school year, it is the end of summer, and for me, it represents the time to come back to ourselves and prepare for the “cold night” of our lives when autumn gathers us inward.
This week, I read Christina Feldman’s commentary, in the Awakin.org newsletter, about how unconscious each of us is about how we “take in the world”, and how this endless consumption of sensory input, thoughts and feelings, shapes the way we view ourselves and our story.
We collect, store, and accumulate so much weight in this life. The thousands of thoughts, ideas, and plans we have are imprinted on our minds. We have engaged in countless conversations and have replayed many of them over and over again. We have moved from one experience to another, one encounter to another, and we think about them all. Information and knowledge has been gathered, digested, and stored, and we carry all of this with us. This input forms our story, the story we have about people, ourselves, and the world. Experiencing the chaos and turbulence of the saturated mind and heart, forgetfulness may look like a blessing. Yet our innate capacity to receive the world, a source of both complexity and of compassion, will always be with us.
I have come to believe that our task is to make sense of our lives, by paying attention and noticing what is changing in our story, and what is remaining stuck about our story. It is our stuckness, that hinders our attempts at making any changes in our lives. It is our stuckness, that makes us cling to certain ways to describe ourselves, even when they no longer apply to us. When we don’t reflect on our lives regularly, we cannot meaningfully consider change. We become too afraid that we will lose ground, lose our sense of self, our identity. And yet, it is critical for us to recognize the need for truth telling and flexibility, in the story we tell ourselves about who we are “at our core”. This is because, when we stop and reflect on it, our identity is in constant motion. Who we have been is in the past, and who we are becoming, is in the now, and who we hope to be, is in the future.
As we age, it is much harder to tell ourselves the truth about who we are, because it is usually a time of sloughing off many of the roles that we have engaged in, that gave our lives meaning and value. We begin to ask what will become of us if we no longer have vital roles that are recognized as important in our culture?
People who live with a disability are perpetually facing this kind of inner discord in themselves. They find themselves asking: “What is it that gives my life value, and how do I support others to become interested in, and learn what I bring to the world?” They in turn, ask themselves: “Why won’t people re-evaluate the story about who I am in the world and who I can become?”
But first, they need to keep their own sense of self in motion, so that they can take on meaningful change and keep re-writing their story about who they are and who they are becoming. Families and others play a pivotal role in supporting their loved one in this process of looking at who they are, who they are becoming and what they bring to the world. In playing this role, we open up the same inquiry in our own lives.