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Staying In Touch With Oneself
Increasingly, we live in a society where we are grouped, labeled, defined, and marketed in more and more impersonal ways. We are judged by our cover more than ourselves, Superficial impressions and remote contact seem to be the order of the day. As technology explodes we feel we can't possibly keep up, no matter how fast we learn. We're inevitably obsolete. It is hard to imagine how our children and grandchildren will live, and learn of themselves.
We hear people say they are so busy living their lives they're forgetting who they are. Some people tell us that nothing seems to matter anymore. In this whirl of roles played and external stimuli responded to and time flying, it is easy to loose touch with who we are and where we are. It is hard to find the time and space for each other, let alone time for personal reflection. It takes effort just to stop, and become aware again, of ourselves.
Every generation has its struggles with issues of adapting and maintaining personal integrity. Indeed in 1601 Shakespeare warned us in Hamlet:
"This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man."
We must choose what to assimilate from society and how to achieve a sense of balance and integrity. We fear that as a society, the overemphasis on cognitive function, the processing of information, has left less room for affective function, or the integration of sensory experience, our feelings. If we are to achieve that integration, what Webster defines as "blending into a functioning or unified whole," we need to pay attention to our feelings, which are a truthful expression of who we are.
People find various ways to get back in touch with what they truly want and need. Sometimes, simply stopping to smell the roses, literally, can help get us back in touch with the environment. Lying in the grass and watching the clouds go by seems like a luxury these days, but that kind of reflection helps children think about who they are in the bigger world. It works for adults too. So does the simple act of listening to our heart beating, or looking into another's eyes.
The return to cooking for pleasure, gardening, hiking and biking, camping, birding, weaving and needlework, reading and listening all help us stay in touch with the simple sensory pleasures of being connected. Just breathing - taking in the world and letting it out again, can be a vital exercise in awareness.
A teacher of ours said that we must lose our minds to come to our senses. Actually, we must integrate our minds and our senses. Although we all have a number of roles to play, beyond these roles we have a self. We have varying wants and needs. To know them, attention should be paid them. The integration of those wants and needs, the true experience of the self, is the goal of integrity. We grow ourselves and know each other in the process of becoming true.
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