A time came…

When I suddenly found myself saying, “I want to know who I am more than I want the approval of another human being. Who am I really? That was my question and so strong was it there was no room for another question inside of me.

The other day I heard a talk on the subject of loyalty. The speaker came to say, as humans we should all be loyal to humanity. I shuddered at the term “should be”. It got me to thinking that I have been confronted with that term from the time other people had made me into a creature who could begin to comprehend their words…”should be”. By now,  I am deeply experienced in the way of trying to be what I should be. It began at home. Then there was the radio. Then there was television. And schools. A spouse. And bosses. And groups I said I belonged to. Exercises. Diets. Religions. Politics. Art. Music. Books. And I had failed many times to be what I should be. I began to notice more and more that, wait a minute, for every thought I have of what I should be there is the opposite thought. I have been brought slyly into a great war inside of me by all this confusion. And I call it “My Life”. I considered an attempt to end it. Then the thought came instead to risk it all and find out who I really am loyal to if anybody. Immediately the term “Loyalty” came to have new meaning. I wanted to know who I am loyal to naturally absent any effort to be loyal. I thought of my cat. She was a one-man kitty naturally. I had no doubt about that. My cat was not striving for approval at all. In fact, she was teaching me how it can be so for a living thing to just be. I was seeing it as a strong sort of stubbornness that I had to admire greatly, so foreign was it to me. I wondered whether I might have that kind of stubbornness in me when it clicked that my single question was coming from such a place.

And gradually I am aware more and more that the truth is that the moment a named virtue is cultivated it loses all sense of being virtuous for it loses the soul in its meaning which is what my cat had all along. She was what she was and asked not to be congratulated.

I want to add that a willingness to stop shopping for meaning is the same as turning a valve in me that floods me with just enough stubborn to be a real human being.

NOBODY has written this before.