“Please explain yourself!”
It is bewildering. The self is always with us, yet easy to forget. We are someone’s child and parent, colleague, friend, and teammate. Within layers of relationships, we talk with one another about the rights and wrongs of daily issues and changes in emotion. The important point here is “with one another.” But the moment people gather and talk about one another, how honest and bold can we be about ourselves? Sometimes, after meeting someone or ending a phone call, I feel rather hollow on the way back. I cannot say these times are meaningless, but perhaps the journey of explaining myself is more effective when it is done alone, because I need to compare myself with my past self, think about the self others speak of, verify the self I recognise, and also imagine the paths that wise people present as right.
Moreover, there are more than enough ways to explain myself. My strengths and weaknesses, my chronology, my thoughts, philosophy, and principles, my assets, my background, the books I have read, my hobbies, my morality, the god I believe in, the people I am drawn to, the people I respect, the spaces I like, the people I loved, my goals... At some point, a sentence by Hermann Hesse lodged sharply in my heart: “Every human life is a path toward itself.”
To centre myself, align the many paths and directions of the world - God, the universe and the organisation - toward meaning, and explain them until I can understand myself on my own. That may be all there is to life.
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