Messed Up People...

“Integrity, like humility, is a quality which vanishes the moment we are conscious of it in ourselves. We see it only in others.” Madeline L'Engle

I am a writer and therefore I write. I am a guitarist, and therefore I play guitar. But when I try to do either of those? I fall flat on my face, disappointed at the results from both. By putting myself in the mindset that “I need to do this… I need to do this well,” I no longer am the writer or guitarist, I try to do the writing; I try to play the guitar. By doing so, I have separated myself from that which I am. Any piece of writing that I present to the world, if it is to be worth anything, is that which I really have no consciousness of; more, it has consciousness of me. When I attempt to attain consciousness of it, it becomes like hubris, the false pride. I know I fall the way of hubris all too often.

And yet, I continue to write. I continue to play guitar. And there are times when, by the grace of God, I do so well. I enter into what Daniel Goleman would call a state of flow. Flow is the state when excellence become effortless, when doing becomes being. Flow is when my ontological self is aligned with my daily self. Some people are more “put together,” more “whole” in our minds. Our thoughts are that they must be: what they do, they do so effortlessly, right? Therefore, they must not be messed up; they must be more “whole.”

“The most ‘whole’ people I know are those in whom the gap between the ‘ontological’ self and the daily self if the smallest.” L'Engle

Put together people are really no less messed up than any of the rest of us; they are merely acceptant of the fact that they are messed up. Their ontological self is their daily self. As much as I am a writer, I am a failure at writing, and yet I continue to do it, as I know that I need to. I need to fail in order to know what failure looks like. Once I have seen failure, I can have a standard for what failure is not.

The people I really look up to in life are those who seem to be much more put together. They are admirable in that they take the world as it is, and present themselves as they are. Their ontological beings are one in the same with their daily ones. They allow God to direct them, as they need to be directed; they are in harmony with the Way, and let the Way form them. They let themselves become the uncarved block that lets active non-action carve them into who they are. They “become less as God becomes more.” Really, their outer lives become more and more transparent to the God within.

“The gap between our ‘real’ and ‘actual’ selves is, to some degree, in all of us; no one is completely whole. It’s part of what makes us human beings instead of gods… When we refuse to face this gap in ourselves, we widen it.” L'Engle

When we refuse to acknowledge the fact that we are formless until our Former molds us as they see fit, we only widen ourselves from the Former. When we refuse to acknowledge that it is only by God’s grace that we can actually do anything, we separate ourselves from being anything. It is when we acknowledge the distance between our real selves and our actual selves, yet not dwell upon this fact, that we are able to have no distance therein. If this sounds backwards: that’s because it is. Only when we are able to be formless are we able to be formers. Only when we relax into active non-action are we able to do anything: be anything.