How to Find Yourself, Part 1
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
Part of saving your marriage involves finding and saving yourself. Whenever I write this, though, someone emails or comments here, saying something to the effect of, “Yeah, well, that’s easier said than done.”
That’s true, which is why I decided to write this series.
The first step to finding yourself, however, is a deceiving one. It involves doing the polar opposite of what you think you ought to be doing. It’s this: stop being so introspective!
Sure, some people might find themselves by locking themselves in their bedrooms so they can smoke a lot of pot and play random notes on a hand-me-down guitar. Maybe others do it by checking themselves into a monastery so they can spend their days in silence. And still others might do it by heading into a secluded location with just a backpack and a pair of hiking boots.
Yet, plenty of people emerge from such experiences just as lost—if not more so—than when they started.
I personally believe that spending a lot of time on introspection is a lot like sitting in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean. The ocean is so vast that you cannot see any shore line. You don’t have a map and you don’t know which way to go. So you just sit still and you think about it, and you think about it, and you think about it some more.
You know what? If you keep thinking about it? You’re never going to find the shoreline. You’re just going to drift here and there and never make any progress.
Wouldn’t it be better to just start rowing, even if you didn’t know where you might end up? Even if you rowed in the wrong direction, at least you’d be getting somewhere. And, as you rowed, things would happen. Fish would swim around your boat. Birds would poop on your head. Your muscles would get sore. You’d experience things—things that will give you better sense of who you are and of what you are made.
That’s pretty much how I’ve gone about finding myself over the years. When my daughter was 2, my marriage was in the toilet, and I was so spent from giving that I’d completely lost myself? I didn’t think about it. If I’d stopped to think about who I was? I would have fallen asleep. I can tell you that.
Instead of doing that, I signed up for a mindfulness meditation class. And sure, meditation takes you inward, but it’s not the same kind of inward as introspection. Meditation takes you to a place where you can observe your thoughts, feelings and sensations. It takes you to an unwavering core—a part of yourself that never changes. You don’t sit and keep asking yourself “who am I? who am I? who am I?” No, you sit, close your eyes, and be.
I can tell you that about meditation now, years later. At the time? I had no idea if that class was going to help me. At the time? It was just one way that I could row. That was all.
And the meditation class did not get me to the shore. It just got me a little bit closer. After I took it, I started reading marital improvement books, which got me closer still. Then I started blogging, which got me even closer. I went to conferences. I read more books. I started going to the Buddhism class.
Basically whenever I felt like I was drifting about without an anchor? I did something. I didn’t know if the something that I tried was going to help or not, but I tried it anyway. It was in the trying—the act of rowing—that I learned more about who I was and who I wanted to become.
So start rowing that boat. There’s no one right path. The only wrong path, in my opinion, is the one that requires dropping the oars and sitting still.
And, it must be said: we never reach the shore. The art of finding yourself? It’s the journey that’s called life. Live it.
Do you feel lost? Have you struggled with finding yourself? Or, have you made a lot of progress and have advice to share? Either way, leave a comment, so we can all learn from one another.
