A focus of mine for the last few months has been really opening to my eyes to who I am and why I operate in the Greer fashion. I have had so much desire lately to discover and rediscover parts of myself, curious about certain behavior patterns and interested as to where their roots are embedded.
I have seen that understandably much of who I am stems from my parents. Those influences have allowed me to appreciate the power of hard work, the power of relationship, the value of support, and the importance of love.
However, from many areas of influence, familial and outside of the nuclear unit, I have been conditioned in a way to be a certain kind of person. And just now am I realizing the power of those influences, and just how strong 23 years of habit can be. Now I am striving toward authenticity. At the end of my day, I don't want to behave in manners that don't express my truest and deepest nature. So many parts of my being are habitual, so many elements of my existence are a product of information from someone or something else and just now am I craving to create my own solid being.
For myself, this kind of realization is horrible and wonderful. It feels real and appropriate to be striving in this way, but it is also enabling me to acknowledge that significant parts of me aren't. I work to the point of exhaustion, I place myself in situations sometimes based on how they look to others, I am proud and stoic when I don't want to be, I get impatient. And yes all of these things are real emotions I am not saying that they aren't, but they come from a place of expectation...of myself and of others.
I want to live out my day without one eye on the clock and one foot out the door. I want to be present and available to others, I want to spend my free time doing exactly what feels right, and I want to appreciate the relationships in my life for the joy and expansion that they bring to my world. I think for so long I have been afraid of being exactly who I am. I have feared that people wouldn't accept me or that I would end up alone. But that mentality just makes me feel lonelier on the inside.
I strive now to be real. I am not going to be afraid of rejection...I am going to fall asleep each night with no regrets of being false.
1 comment:
Hey Greer,
I hear you on this one; I have gotten really frustrated at times with feeling unable or incapable of letting go of thoughts and emotions that carry me away from the "now." One thing that I have realized, and continue to realize on a daily basis with varying levels of success, is that this frustration is clinging in and of itself; that I am qualifying my feeling incapable as "bad" and my feeling capable as "good." Or that when I am having difficulty with being present, that this is somehow "bad." I still struggle with this quite a lot, but I am learning that the more I adapt an attitude of lovingkindness toward myself--with total acceptance and without judgement or harshness--the thinner the barrier between striving to be present and just being present becomes. It seems completely counterintuitive, but I guess that makes sense in some weird way since being who we are seems to be more experiential than cognitive. Anyway, reading your blog entry led to my wanting to contribute a comment on my own experience. Hope your day in Boulder is great, Geeb. Oh yeah, and I really enjoyed our talk the other week; I'm looking forward to our next phone conversation. Peace out home friz.
Love,
Chris
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