Guiding Light: Before The World Told You Who To Be

Majority of us want success, but at the same time we also want peace. We want recognition, but we also want to feel accepted for who we are. We want good and healthy relationships, but we also want freedom. We want material comfort, but somewhere within us there is a longing for something that money cannot buy. Hence, the real challenge of life is not choosing between the outer world and the inner world, but learning how to live in both without losing ourselves. And losing ourselves is easier than we think. It happens gradually, quietly, without announcement. One compromise here, one distraction there, one role added and another forgotten, and slowly the person we were before the world told us who to be becomes harder and harder to find.

Each one of us have this inherent potential to express qualities such as love, peace, truth, creativity, compassion and wisdom. But, before we become defined by our profession, possessions, status, successes or failures, there is something much simpler within us, which is known as an awareness that can observe, understand, choose and change. We may call it the soul, consciousness or our inner self. However, the tragedy is that we spend so much time building an identity for the world that we sometimes forget the identity we have for ourselves. Throughout our life, we become someone's designation, someone's parent, someone's partner, someone's friend. We become our achievements, our failures, our appearance, our bank balance, our reputation and even the opinions that others have about us. And then one day while sitting alone, we wonder why, despite having so much, we don't feel completely at ease. That’s because the outer identity can never permanently satisfy our inner need. It can impress. It can comfort. It can even distract, sometimes for years. But it cannot fill the space that belongs to something deeper. And that space does not go away simply because we ignore it. It waits. Quietly and patiently. Until we are finally still enough to notice it. But ! the good news is that nothing has been lost. That awareness, that original, uncluttered version of who we are is still there. Beneath the roles, beneath the noise, beneath the opinions and the achievements and the disappointments. It has always been there. And finding our way back to it is perhaps the most important journey any of us will ever take.