Cosmic Cowboys, paper collage, 2024

As I was having coffee this morning, I found myself contemplating some of the ideas I encountered in Carl Rogers’s On Becoming a Person, which I was rereading the other day. And I was struck by a thought that I believe is worth sharing:

Allow yourself to be shaped by experience. Don’t be limited by your own preconceptions about who you are and what you’re capable of. That’s a good recipe for falling out of love with life.

If an inner voice tells you to start painting, to start writing poetry, or to research a long-forgotten interest, do it, even if it doesn’t make sense to you or those around you. Don’t listen to the other, competing inner voice that says, “But, I don’t know how…I’ve never done that before…I’m too old…I’m too young…I’m too busy.” The former voice, which encourages you to grow, expand, and explore, sometimes in unexpected directions, is your self, and it’s often very quiet. The latter voice, which is always much louder, has one job, and that is to sabotage you. We all have an inner saboteur. The less you listen to it, the less power it has.

The more you listen to your self, the stronger the self becomes. And before you know it, it’s guiding you from experience to experience. You may find that you’re developing skills or exploring interests you never knew you had. You may even find that you’re feeling emotions you didn’t know you could feel, or you’re experiencing your impulses and emotions differently. You may even be using different language to refer to yourself: “I’m an artist…I’m a musician…I’m a chef…I’m a runner…I’m a photographer.”  

One day, you’ll take a step back and look at yourself and think, “I had no idea who I was.” I had no idea I could do these things, that I could be interested in these things, that I could love these things, that I could feel fulfilled by these things. It seems unfathomable that you could ever have been different. 

Allow yourself to be shaped by experience. Be open to experience, but more importantly, be open to your own possibilities. Be adaptable, be flexible in your conceptions of self. There are few experiences in this life that are more gratifying than when your sense of self changes for the better, when it expands to incorporate newly discovered talents, interests, abilities, and feelings. 

Know that, within you, there is a tremendous wellspring of possibility, of potential that is just waiting to be discovered. Know that every moment is unique, and in every unique moment, you are capable of becoming someone different, someone new. That is how you fall in love with life. That’s when life becomes an adventure. That’s when life becomes fun.