copyright Bela Johnson, published in The Maine Eagle, July 2000

There are many words of wisdom encouraging us to be better people: love one another, treat others as we would like to be treated, imagine walking a mile in another's shoes. Surely our being mindful of these ideas can lead us away from more destructive behavior. Yet I've often asked myself how we can fully grasp such concepts when we don't innately know who we are and what we stand for.

In his book The Search for Authenticity, J.F.T. Bugental states that "the world of daily happenings is set in a larger world of human experience." We continue to adjust to a culture that has lost much of its more humane qualities due to technological expansion. "Adjustment has come to mean acceptance of the values of competitive striving, accumulation of material 'goods,' secrecy and separateness." We can get so wrapped up in the whirlwind of our fast-moving lives that we dread the silence offered by solitude. In these quiet spaces we are able to reflect, yet reflection often overwhelms us with guilt for what we feel has passed us by. Instead we may watch as relationships, including that which we establish with our own inner self, disintegrate due to our unwillingness to attend to them. We need this, children or partners need that, and pretty soon we stand at the threshold of life wondering why we feel a void. And instead of being in and with the silence, we create more distractions to place ourselves at the center of the chaos that has become our familiar.

I'm not saying chaos in itself is a bad thing. In fact in the very act of creating something we must surrender to the chaotic in order to birth new possibilities. Many of us know the experience of frantically searching for the answer to a question and having that answer pop into our heads the minute we stop thinking so hard about it. This is part of the surrender to the chaos of creation, where we may find ourselves in the eye of the storm, so to speak. We let chaos whirl about as it will, while maintaining our center, holding a space for an answer to emerge. Yet how many of us consciously honor this process? We have been conditioned in a culture which embraces the truth that if we only work hard enough, what we wish for will be fashioned by the sweat of our brow. Allowing space to reflect might be thought of as laziness and complacency.

Creativity itself sits on the back burner of our culture, cast aside with those of us who simply cannot move fully into the technological paradigm. Somehow we creative types have come through life with our sensitivities intact, and live with a deep conviction that there is something unique we must express. Yet it is my belief that each and every one of us comes into the world with this seed of uniqueness, our own gift to the world. And if we fail to germinate this seed, there seems to be an unsettling feeling of something left undone. If we do not explore this feeling through the act of reflection, the gift lies dormant within us and its expression may be lost to us forever. The unacknowledged despair generated from this dormancy may lead to depression, itself almost epidemic in today's fast-paced world. Failing to express our essential nature leads to disease (dis-ease: lack of ease), a sort of fragmentation inevitably resulting in emotional as well as physical distress (di-stress: stress times two, double the stress that is healthy, leading to the breakdown of the immune system).

Having the courage to explore our creative potential can be termed the search for authenticity, or being as fully in the world as we are able. When we can take an honest look at ourselves and accept ourselves more completely, we are more likely to meet others with clear eyes and an open heart, knowing the difficulties we all face in being human. Distractions drop away as we become more able to function from a more authentic place within us that helps us focus on what is real for us, what is important. Peeling away the layers of cultural hype that separate us from one another is a process we cannot accomplish overnight. It may even take most of a lifetime, yet this exciting journey provides us with deep gratification beyond any external system set up to mandate rules for us to live by. I believe we all know the rules, deep inside. They are basic to our human be-ing. When we do not honor our own need to express ourselves, our frustrations spill over into our relationships with others. Our own dissatisfaction creates feelings of competitiveness, especially when we see others trying to attend to their own inner garden. And we might not even realize we are doing this, hence the need for reflection!

There are two essential factors of our existence: life and death. The dynamic of creation supports life and in its absence we experience death on many levels. Most of us know the occasional experience of moving through certain days of our lives as though we are "dead on our feet." Both life and death are givens in our existence, yet in order to die well, we might consider the importance of living more fully, expressing more of who we are by exploring the creative depths of our own souls.