I’ve spent many more combined minutes in my life trying to look like somebody rather than trying to be somebody. It’s funny how easy it is to locate your best self in products at the store rather than within you. It’s as though we need these products to realize ourselves. Maybe we do.
Maybe we need them in order to realize that our best self has nothing to do with them. Maybe it is a map leading to fool’s gold that we all need to spend hours, days, months, and years pursuing and digging up, getting filth under our fingernails and losing millimeters on our hairlines (or centimeters), only to discover that what we were digging up has no value.
And maybe that IS its value.
Perhaps it is that journey towards nothing—and nothing we do find—that allows us to identify “something” when it’s standing right in front of us. Not in the mirror, not in the bank account, not in our significant others, but in our acceptance of our flawed, limited selves.
Perhaps it is this acceptance which allows us to become the men we will be for the rest of our lives. Will we spend our lives polishing a mirror, trying to draw more and more pleasure out of our reflection? Or will we polish and arrange the components of our lives into something verifiably functional and perhaps even vaguely satisfying?
Is it a real man who makes friends with reality? Or is he at odds with it? Does he fight it as a snake fights a mongoose, only to inevitably lose? Or does he collaborate with it? Does he live as a barnacle or a vagrant, eating what it throws away? Or does he try to undo it, only to learn too late that he can’t win because he is a part of it, and he is really fighting himself?
It is a riddle that he writes, that he answers, and that he gets wrong many times before he gets it right. And there is no one answer.
What if he could bypass this process and simply accept reality from the outset? Accept himself and his limitations and by accepting them, exceed them? Would his life yield the rewards of self-discovery seemingly reserved for the blessedly foolish? Would he even know he had exceeded them? Would he know anything?
If one is asking this question, it is not worth it to wonder, for that is a different life than one’s own. One’s time is better spent finding oneself—one’s joys, one’s sorrows, one’s pleasures, one’s repugnancies—through experience, through sharing the words of one’s heart, leaving the products on the shelf and learning to trust one’s inner inventory.
For while all other things run out, expire, get lost, stolen, broken, or diminished, that warmth and abundance is always with us, inside.
Aulos Media 