Non Sum Qualis Eram
(I am not who I used to be)
This is my first article for my editorial column in our college publication. It’s also the only piece of writing I’ve ever gotten the guts to publish.
I am posting this for reasons I will reveal in my next entry.
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I’m in the middle of four novels right now, the last one I started two hours prior to writing this first sentence. I can’t tell you what happens in A Hundred Secret Senses, The Bell Jar or A Thousand Splendid Suns – yet. What I can tell you is that in Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Blue Van Meer stood up in the middle of a university lecture and dashed out the exit to write the introduction to her autobiography and the novel itself.
I could only wish that I was as enthused as Blue when I began this piece. While she had a flash of inspiration, my motivation was more out of necessity, akin to forcefully giving birth to something that is two months overdue. My excuse for the ridiculously long delay is simple: I allowed myself to be paralyzed by criticisms yet to exist about a piece I’ve yet to write.
In retrospect, it’s silly, but my mistake is common. Too often we look outside of ourselves and seek in others the validation and permission to do, to say and even to be what we want. Unless we have some devious criminal plans for world domination and the violation of human rights, we shouldn’t. What we need is in us. As Rainier Maria Rilke wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet, “Go into yourself.”
Walking around campus, I see new tarpaulins proclaiming hopeful messages. One in particular resonated with so many of my personal philosophies that I have adopted it as my mantra: “Today, I start the change I want to see.” It is reminiscent of what Gandhi said (“Be the change you want to see in the world.”), save it encourages us to begin the change now. The message dwells in possibility while focusing on the present. I am attracted to the line primarily because it recognizes our power to change things and to begin this transformation by making a decision to take control of the only thing we have real power over: ourselves.
Most of what we are right now is a confluence of past decisions we’ve wittingly or unwittingly made. Some people may not like certain aspects of themselves; some may not like themselves at all. There are bad habits, attitudes and other negative qualities we may want to blame on other people or certain events in the past but truth is they can only influence us. They can evoke emotions from us but without our permission, they can’t make us do or be anything. Even genetics cannot be blamed because we were given the faculties to think before committing to any action.
We are fortunate though, because we don’t have to be trapped by our previous notions of ourselves or who we’ve decided to be in the past. We can always change. And everything we want to be is already within us. Each of us has it in ourselves to be the worst and best human being that ever walked this planet. We just have to choose. We have to decide what we want, and who we want to be.
One’s choices are about the only thing that separates those who are successful from those who are unsuccessful, those who are generally happy from those who are in perpetual misery, and those who often pass evaluations from those who often fail them. Empowerment, happiness, success, and much of everything else is a decision.
If you want to be empowered, then be empowered. If you want to be happy, then be happy. It’s simple, but it isn’t always easy. One has to continually work and make choices in alignment to what one believes one is or what he or she wants to be.
Our decisions are influenced by a lot of things, especially by what we value, whether it’s principles, achievements or just needing to fit in. It is therefore important that we analyze what we value because this is where we will gravitate. We should also make conscious decisions as often as we can to avoid the risk of allowing others to decide for us. We do not live in a void. We influence and are influenced by others. But if we take control of what we allow to impact our lives, we can glean great things from great people. And if we recognize our own power to impact others, we can achieve the “changes we want to see”. By example we could remind and inspire others to be empowered and together we could realize things greater than anything we could have achieved individually.
