Becoming Who You Are

“Become who you are” – Friedrich Nietzsche

It is a paradoxical imperative. Aren’t you already you? How can you become yourself?

The idea that Nietzsche was expressing is that we are all developing on the journey through life. You are no more the same person you were 10 years ago than you will be 10 years hence. Nietzsche challenges us to take ownership of the process. Will you go through life, mindlessly reacting to situations, or will you chose to intentionally move in a direction.

The choices we make influence who we are and who we are becoming. In order to take control of that process we need to figure out who we are and who we want to be. Summit Ascent recommends taking time for solitude, for journaling, to reflect on these questions. When we identify this, we are able to start taking action to achieve the best version of ourselves. Just like no one is born a doctor, no one is born honest, courageous, powerful, and so on. It is something that is practiced over time. A doctor goes to school and practices how to be a doctor. Likewise if a person wants to be honest, they need to practice honesty. In any given moment we are faced with an option to move towards that person we are meant to be, or further away.

This idea hit home for me when I took ethics with Prof. Hines. It was Hines’s belief that no one single act was so evil or nefarious to exclude a person from heaven. Rather it was the choices made over a lifetime – repeatedly choosing lust over intimacy, pride over selflessness, bad over good. Hines pointed out that it was the choices we made that defined not only who we were in that moment but also who we are becoming in the future – we may be known as an honest person until we are caught in one-too-many fibs and then we may be known as a liar a la the story about “the boy who cried wolf”.

Was the boy crying wolf intentionally trying to become known as a liar? Probably not. He was likely just like most of us, going through life and reacting to his desires, reacting to situations he found himself in without thinking. When you just react you give up control. Nietzsche encourages us to take back that control and become our best selves.

At Summit Ascent we believe that there is a true, authentic self within each of us. It is who we are at our core. On our trips and in the journals we write, we encourage people to take the time to reflect on who they are and who they want to be. We have solitude experiences where you sit in the quiet to try to hear that authentic self. We encourage reflection through journal writing. At the end of the day, like my ethics teacher said, we are given the choices on who we want to be. If we repeatedly choose an option directing us away from whom we are at the core, then we are slowly building towards our own internal hell. The dissonance in our actions compared to who we are begins to make us feel empty, hollow, and sardonic towards life. Conversely, when the choices we make align with our authentic self we become happier, feel more complete, and are more readily able to find joy in life.

With this new year, now is as good a time as any to ask: Who are you?

#Found #Journaling #Beginning #Paradigm #Intentionality