Belonging to One's Own Life

We have to choose our authenticity, but in a better world, we wouldn’t have to.

Pilgrims on the shared road, seeking to Belong | Photo Credit Bodi Hallett

There are two ways  
to be made whole: 
Connection 
is the horizontal integration to Other, and 
Integrity & Authenticity 
are the Vertical integration,
to Self. 

The sad fact of a human life is this:

You can have one without the other, you can have either vertical integration without the latter or vice versa. You can have Connection without Integrity and Authenticity and you can adhere uncompromisingly to your Integrity and it can cost you Connection with others.

And when pressed, one really should choose the latter, even if it brings with it utter loneliness, because integrity is holding the line, even though it might cost you everything, because to not, would cost you you.

We have to choose our authenticity, but in a better world, we wouldn’t have to.

The highest goal and most sublime pleasure we are wired to pursue is to belong, indelibly, to the exact place where one wishes to belong, and specifically in a way of belonging, where our belonging cannot be taken away, and if it is somehow lost through a mistake of ours or someone else’s, we are missed, our place is held, and we are offered a fair way back.

It is the kind of belonging for which we have to sacrifice only that which is small and selfish within us, which we cling to or which clings to us, and which gets in the way of loving and being loved.

It is a membership whose only requirements are that we truly value the membership greater than we value our victim story, and that we embody a prerequisite and earnest need to belong to one’s self, where both proof and wage are reckoned by a resolute refusal to sacrifice that which is great within you, an unwavering devotion to the principle which says:

“I refuse to compromise on my truth, in my quest for meaning and acceptance.”

We are living through a crisis of meaning, and in our desperation to belong we are enshrining a world so shallow, ailing from such a failing of humanity that some people wake into their mornings, and go, to their sleep again each night despite their most earnest efforts to love, cradling the truth, that they do not belong.

Overwhelm.

To be overwhelmed, is to have been half born into the next place that we were not ready for, and to be alarmed at how loud and pressing the demand arrives that we give something of ourselves we are not ready to give, seeking a hurried way back to the way we had been.

We all have the experience of having become so uncomfortable where we were so as to have been rushing towards something new, in the hopes of a gentle salvation, only to be woken up to the full weight of that new demand on us, and not yet realising that the thing that struggles to belong to this place is not our selves, but our old way of being in the world, that part that still holds on to the old way of suffering.

To belong fully to a larger life, to inhabit a wider, more expansive way of being, something has to be threshed and surrendered. We never get told the secret, that to half-arrive, unequipped and unrehearsed, is the very essence of Vulnerability, that essential and very necessary price of admission to the next place, and how it is the only way we can ever make the discovery about the true essence of Life and courage within us.

Belonging.

The secret to Belonging is timing. We have to accept there is a time to give, a time to receive, a time to carry and to be carried, to yield and to stand firm.

How do we know then when to challenge and when to Choose?

The compass that will never fail us, is not a rule-set from a book, although it is echoed in our ancient wisdoms and spiritual traditions. It is simply the shape love makes when you hold it in your heart. It is to sit with the question “What does Love look like right now?” It is asking “What would I want, if that were me, or if I were my own leader and best friend?”

That is how to Belong, and our first place of belonging has to be ourselves. We are our first temple. Our breath is our first thruth, the way we are holding the Conversation of Life is the path we are following. The challenges, flaws talents and adversity we have is the way. The real hanging question is how soon can we accept where we are, and who we are, and what we truly want from this life, because all of that is won and lost in how we show up. It is how we invest our energy and attention, like written letter and coins cast into the river of time we call our life, in the service of those noble intentions, rather the picking of the bones of our misfortunes in a form of lament and distress.

The only power we really have in the face of the unfolding mystery is Stance. We get to choose how we face what is unfolding, how we meet it, and how we embody the delicate balance between dignity and vulnerability, between surrender and defiance. Stance is everything. We can choose our stance in every moment, and in the end, who we are in this Life, is who we repeatedly Choose to be.