Premier among the consequences is the capacity to imagine possible futures, and to plan and choose among them. How wisely we use this uniquely human ability depends on the accuracy of our self-understanding. The question of greatest relevant interest is how and why we are the way we are and, from that, the meaning of our many competing visions of the future. Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence
It is that time of year, Christmas present shopping time, when it gets brought to my attention that I have over 600 items on my Amazon wish list. I thought it was bad a couple of years ago when there were 300 items. Most of these items are books. Books on art, books of poetry, graphic novels and memoirs. Books on healing, from healing with Tibetan singing bowls to books on neuroscience and trauma. Lately, I feel an overwhelm of information and a general unease of what to do with it all, how to make sense of it. When I found this quote, it was helpful for me to see, that yes, we can have “many competing visions of the future” and how do we then let our most wonderful future unfold? How do we create an accurate self-understanding?
For such a long time for me, my self-understanding came from books. From Huck Finn when I was about 10 or 12, to Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice, at around 13, to my love of anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald in high school, to Wordsworth and Coleridge in college. There was only a small time frame, when my girls were little, when I didn’t read voraciously. I thought to myself, “hmm, maybe I just don’t like to read anymore.” I was just too busy and engaged in my outer world of parenting. Sometimes now, I worry about being too dependent on books, maybe I should get out more. Worry less about my self-understanding, my self-awareness.
This self-awareness could be partly a trap; even though it is hugely stressed in the process of becoming a therapist. I partly believe that if we aren’t aware of our shadow selves, those parts of ourselves that we disown, that they will show up continually in our futures, in ways that might surprise us. But then again, maybe that’s ok, maybe it’s alright if we never truly know all of ourselves. Maybe we can let go a bit and trust that our best future will present itself at our doorstep, and we won’t ever fully know which bit of our past journey created the present we now know.
Perhaps there is an art to creating and resting, or resting and engaging, reading and playing outdoors, being internal and being external. I know I will most likely not ever order or read the 600 books on my Amazon wish list. I just bought and read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which I made myself finish, not because I really liked it, but because it seemed like the right thing to do, in light of her writing from a place of grief, I felt I needed to honor her grief. And in so doing, I realized that I have to create my own writer’s life, that Didion’s life of writing was her life, and I can glimpse into the lives of writers, of therapists, of poets, but I do indeed, need to create my own life, in which I create the balance, the outcome of mothering, of writing, of being a good therapist, and of just taking walks.
