Being You

            If you could be anyone in the world, who would you be?  Why?  Would you be you?  Why?

            Everyone has obstacles.  Yet it is easy to view another’s obstacles as easier to overcome than your own.  That’s why they are that person’s obstacles and not your own.  When viewed from the internal perspective, with all of the emotions and so on that exist there, everything seems large.  Yet those same things, when viewed from outside, can seem quite insignificant and small.

            If you have difficulty trusting people, then every time a person does the slightest thing that suggests a betrayal of trust or a justification for your not trusting him or her, this action looms large in your eyes and mind and heart, lingering there and further shaping your experience through your reaction to it.  If you have difficulty empathizing with people, every time someone does something that you wouldn’t do yourself, this can potentially be magnified into a reason to cut that person off from your life.  If you have difficulty getting close to people and opening up to them, every time you open up at all and the person doesn’t react the way you’d like, you might shrink back again into yourself, ever more determined not to open up to anyone again.

            Notice that, in every case, if this issue is not your issue, it can seem almost a non-issue.  But this, in itself, is a failure to recognize the other perspectives in the world outside of your own.  We are all dealing with things, and whatever we are dealing with, we find difficult—we find it to be an issue.

            You can learn a lot about someone’s experience of the world by taking note of the themes of issues in that person’s life.  We almost define ourselves by our obstacles, by the things we struggle with, by the things we need to learn to overcome.  But defining ourselves by these things, focusing much of our energy upon them, will not help us to overcome them.  When you define yourself by your obstacles, you tie yourself to them like an anchor, and you prevent yourself from sailing away from them, from freeing yourself from them.

            Our obstacles are the things that we must learn from and learn to let go of.  For they highlight the things that we are inclined to hold onto, to repeat, to replay, to give our energy to.  A large part of our mission in this life—the reason that we came here—is to overcome these obstacles, to learn from them whatever lessons exist in them to be learned so that we can grow and change and move on.

            Notice that when you do something that you find challenging but that you need to do to reach some desirable goal, you feel a sense of accomplishment, of joy, upon your completion of it.  If you do something that you find easy and that you don’t need to do to reach any goal that you have set for yourself, you will not experience that same feeling of accomplishment upon your completion of it.  The things that you most struggle with are the boulders in the path toward your true goals.  Traveling someone else’s path will not lead you where you truly want to be—where you will find the fulfillment that you truly seek.

            So, if you could be anyone in the world, who would you be?  Your obstacles may seem large to you, but you can know that in overcoming them you will find the true fulfillment that you seek.  There is no other way to gain that fulfillment of reaching your greatest goals—no way other than to learn to overcome your own obstacles, no way other than by being you.