Meeting Ourselves

We are, most of us, the last to meet ourselves.

It isn't that we don't look. We look every day. But we look the way you look at a room you have lived in for years, so familiar that you no longer see it, only the memory of how you arranged it once. The people around us notice what we stopped noticing: the way we go quiet when we are wrong, the pride we have learned to call principle, the small hurts we hand out and call honesty. They have known these things for a long time. Mostly, they have been kind enough not to say.

And we were so sure. That was the only real mistake. Not that we were flawed, but that we thought we had already read the whole of ourselves.

So when the harder seasons come, they don't bring anything new. They only shift the light a little, the way late afternoon finds the dust you never knew was in the air. What was always there becomes visible. That's all.

There is no need to fear that light. It isn't there to shame us. It's only showing us the rest of the room.

And maybe that is what growing is meant to be. Not finally knowing who you are, but softening into not knowing. Leaving a little space. Letting yourself be, gently and for as long as you live, someone you are still getting to know.

And I think that is so beautiful.