Finding Out Who You Are-Daily Meditation 11.8.2022
Today’s quotation:
Committing yourself is a way of finding out who you are. One finds one’s identity by identifying.-Robert Terwilliger
Today’s Meditation:
My identity is already within me, waiting patiently to be exposed to the light of the world. My identity is truly unique, and it will shine forth as long as I let it shine forth. One of the most important ways that I can let it do so is by committing myself to things that truly matter to me so that I can give more of my passion and my abilities to whatever it is I’m committed to.
I recently took a year to live in the Grand Canyon. In order to do this, I had to take a job that wasn’t in my chosen field of teaching. Needless to say, while I was working at the lodges at the Canyon, I wasn’t doing work that helped me to uncover my own identity. I gave all I could to the work and I learned a lot from it, but I didn’t identify with it. Once I began teaching again, though, I immediately started to feel differently about myself and my life, for I was committed to something that was in line with who I am and what I have to contribute to the world.
Some of us are businesspeople. Some are soldiers, some are customer service oriented, and some are cashiers or teachers or carpenters, or landscapers. And all are great professions, as long as we’re committed to something that helps us to discover our true, authentic identity in the midst of so many different ways of living and being. Only in committing ourselves fully to something can we discover our own identity–a half-hearted commitment will lead us only to a glimpse of who we are behind the facades that we’ve learned to put up over the years.
You have a unique identity, but sometimes it doesn’t shine through because you don’t identify with something–a hobby or profession or ideals–to which you’re able to commit yourself fully. Without that commitment, things stay inside of us, never let out, and never exposed to the light of the world. And the light of the world is exactly what it needs to see in order to be able to grow and develop and thrive!
Questions to consider:
To what kinds of things do you fully commit yourself?
Why might so many people have difficulties committing themselves?
Have you found your authentic identity? How did you do so, or what has kept you from doing so?
For further thought:
The value of identity of course is that so often with it comes to purpose.-Richard R. Grant
If you missed yesterday’s Daily Meditation you can read it here.
