How Do You Define Yourself?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could go to any good dictionary – say the Merriam-Webster Online ( http://www.merriam-webster.com/ ) – type in your own name and find out everything YOU needed to know about yourself? There you would find a definition of who you are, a guide to conjugating who you are in the past, present, and future tense, and clues as to how you might be used in a sentence (your purpose).

You may think that by the time you reach Baby Boomer status, you should already know all that. But if you are honest with yourself, I think you will have to admit that who you are is still constantly changing and sometimes it can be confusing and downright frightening.

We are changed by the circumstances and by the people around us. Too often it seems that we have no control over those circumstances or those people – we’re kind of like stones in a polisher. We’re tumbled around until the rough edges are worn down and we come out all bright and shiny. Or we’re tumbled around until a fault line in our character is uncovered and we fall apart. “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”

That phrase from the traditional funeral service is a reminder of our mortality, but it is also a useful metaphor. If you have experienced the kind of fracture described above, or if you are afraid to change lest you suffer such a deterioration, bear in mind that sedimentary rocks are merely dust that has settled and been forced under pressure to become something new and solid.

In other words, change can be frightening, but it is necessary and unavoidable. And even though the pressures of change may threaten to destroy us, they can also mold us into something better. Life is such a wonderful adventure precisely because we never really know where we are going until we get there.

Wherever you are going, you don’t have to go alone. However you are changing, you don’t have to face that change alone. Whatever pressures you are bearing, you don’t have to bear them alone. I can help you. I can give advice and help your clarify your thinking. Or I can just listen. Get in touch with me by email at sara.forboomers@gmail.com . Let’s talk.

I suspect that that is a reason why there is no dictionary that can tell us who we were, who we are, and who we will be. It is because we are always changing. The new, revised edition of that dictionary would become out-dated very soon.

It comes down to this: the only thing about any person’s life that is immutable and carved in stone is their headstone.

And we have a whole lot of living to do before we get to that point. Have a good day, my friend.