In the ongoing quest to be a real human being, disengaging is the best practice. To truly find out who you are, be alone with your thoughts. Slow down. You have to enjoy your own company, like yourself, forgive yourself as you forgive others. Audit where and how you spend your energy and your time. Where you put your treasure is where your heart is, and “treasure” can be many different things.
Who are you? It sounds solipsistic, narcissistic, but it’s a question you have to ask and answer.
There’s a natural tendency to create new identities, try on new skins, which we call “growing up.” At some point, you find one that works. Maybe more superficial sub-categories, but they flow from the same root of you.
In the modern state of perpetual adolescence, this process can take far longer than it ought. Decades. You might not like the man in the mirror, so you shapeshift. The conundrum comes when you lose yourself in the changing personas. To find what is authentic, you need to draw from that well that is in you from the day you were conceived. They say women are born and men are made. Whether that’s accurate is beyond my pay grade, but it feels right, and sometimes feelings are all we’ve got.
I like reading about ancient history. I’m biased, but I enjoy learning about my ancestors, the Greeks. The ages of heroes. Great men. Rites of passage. A harsher world than ours, but a more real one.
But reality never changes, only perceptions. These shifting identities, are they really for you, or for other people? You have to worry about your place in life’s hierarchy—hierarchies are natural and good—but you also have to be able to look at that man in the mirror at the end of the day and find him worthy.
Art from DAVID Dream Station used without permission (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/XBVDYw)
The same stars look down on us that looked down on the ancients. They had the same feelings too. But the edges weren’t sanded off of their world. The cage of safety hadn’t been completed, though they strived to build it. And they built it too well. If those old ones could see the world they’ve wrought, one can only imagine what they’d think of it.
Here’s a poem I wrote several months ago in hoary old iambic pentameter that tries to capture some of these feelings:
O Earth, give back the men whose glory flowed
So natural like water from the spring
No costume for the sunken chested bowed
An echo of the truly living thing
Why do you hoard within your breast the bones
Of better men that tried and failed to teach
Or is this how you try to test our souls
By dangling mysteries forever out of reach?
As shadows in these maladapted times
It may be best to know them by this art
To see our heroes come to life again
May spoil the image held within our heart
The stories and songs we’re left with must suffice
That these old bones are never to die twice
Focus and dedication will never die. Focus on what matters.
- Alexander
Another good post.
I think about this often, how my barbaric ancestors brought empires to their knees. What would they think of me? There are certainly things I like about this world; modern medicine, electricity, and the internet. Things they would have found magical. But they've made us too tame, too docile in many ways. I often wish there was a sort of middle-ground, where we could hold onto the savage wildness of our predecessors while still existing in a world that has such things as pharmacies.
Per books on Greek history, have you read “Gates Of Fire” by Steven Pressfield? The book recounts the Battle of Thermopylae through Xeones, a perioikos (free but non-citizen inhabitant of Sparta) born in Astakos, and one of only three Greek survivors of the battle. It is taught at West Point, the United States Naval Academy, and at the Marine Corps The Basic School. I heard it was really good.