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Today's
Meditation:
It's
so easy to look at ourselves one-dimensionally. We
don't tend to keep in mind that there is much more to us
than what appears before our eyes and how we define
ourselves. These lines make me think of who I am as
an aggregate of everything I've been up until this
moment-- all of my triumphs and successes and mistakes and
failures all have gone into making me who I am, and no
matter what I consider myself to be right here and right
now, much of who I am also includes everything that I've
been until now.
The
little boy who used to love to color and draw still is
inside of me. The young man who wrote poetry and
short stories still is part of who I am. The person
who was afraid of relationships contributed much to my
being, as did the person who was willing to take a huge
risk and buy a one-way plane ticket to Europe and end up
spending three years over there.
I
can reject these other selves that I've been and say that
I've grown out of those stages and become someone else,
but that simplifies things a bit too much. All of
those memories still are an important part of me, as are
all of the lessons, and it would be a shame to reject them
out of hand as simply being a part of "the
past."
I
hadn't though of myself in this way until I read these
words of Madeleine's, but I find it a very helpful and
useful way to see myself. And there are more me's to
come in the future, too, after I learn some of the lessons
that I'm living through now. Just as I'm not
separate from the other people on this planet, I'm also
not separate from the other selves that I've been through
time. So why do I treat myself as if I were?
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