Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives.They waste their years in vain efforts to become some other poet, some other saint. For many absurd reasons, they are convinced that they are obliged to become somebody else who died two hundred years ago and who lived in circumstances utterly alien to their own. They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else’s experiences or write somebody else’s poems or possess somebody else’s spirituality. - Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
The simplest thing is to be who we are, since it is the only true option we have. But it is the most difficult thing to arrive at because we must first understand who we are and learning to know ourselves can be many years work. For some the understanding comes in a flash of insight, but for most it is the gradual peeling away of all that is incidental: The need to please, the desire to emulate what we are drawn to in another, the youthful proclivity towards trying to do everything, to be everything. And throughout, we so easily deceive ourselves. But don’t be discouraged, as you continue on the path to understanding yourself, you will one day see that the journey itself, with all its detours and dead-ends has not delayed your understanding but was, in fact, essential to it.
Blessings,
sam
