If there's a thin line between love and hate, there's an even thinner line between being and seeming! It was Cicero, in one of his most renown essays, "On Friendship," who wrote, "Esse quam videri," which means 'To be rather than to seem."
Popularly, the "in" thing is to 'be different,' but the funny thing about it all is many people are, rebelling, pretending to be different, perpetrating as someone or something that they're not, and behaviorally protesting common sense, all in a worthless attempt to appear to be unique! It's still the 'everyone else is doing it bandwagon' mentality, but it's shrouded behind a facade cloaked in vanity. He is not different: he is imitating someone who is! She is not unique: she is imitating someone who is! Once you project this prevailing social pattern you'll easily see that children have inherited and are growing up in a world overpopulated with imitators imitating the imitations of other imitators! What a masquerade! One word that accurately sums up this blissful ignorance and mindless madness is homogenization! Everything looking the same is the trending norm, seen in, fashion, dress, speech, music, architecture, education, entertainment, sexuality, and on and on: so much so that originality has become a fading rarity when it should be a cool normalcy!
Ironically, the easiest, most fulfilling, most rewarding, most promising, most empowering, and most liberating thing to do is to BE YOUR SELF! Fake it till you make it they say! Get in where you fit in! Go with the flow! Those are treadmill philosophies because no matter how much energy you put into them you'll pretty much always end up exactly where you started, neither having advanced nor withdrawn, simply exhausted and more than likely frustrated from a rigorous exercise in futility: In short, putting your energy into seeming will get you nowhere fast!
The reversal is this, the main people who inspire us to be greater, empower us to truly be ourselves, who motivate us to realize and maximize our innate potentials are people who simply are who they are. Pardon the expression but, they be who they be. They don't make qualms about admitting, accepting, and embracing who they are, and more than likely, as words to live by they always say the same thing, "Be your self!" It's their originality, their uniqueness, their creativity, and their authenticity, their one-of-a-kind persona that motivates us. Sure, these inspiring people are just like you and I and they've learned from somewhere and someone, but with what they've managed to gather amidst what life has brought their way in the form of people, circumstances, information, environment etc., they went and did their own thing with it.
Finally, I'm not advocating a reinvention of the evolutionary wheel and I'm certainly not proposing you follow conventional wisdom which encourages you to find someone great and emulate him or her. What I am suggesting is that you ARE unique, you DO, have specific purposes or callings in this life, but in order to come into the knowledge of what that especial purpose is, you must see with new eyes, perceive with a new perspective, approach life from a new angle...you yourself must be made new! You have to commit, surrender to being a new you and in order for that to happen, you have to first embrace who you are right where you are! Tired, sleepy, hurt, confused, untrusting, stressed out, misunderstood, neglected, emotionally spent, broke, rich, famous, popular, celebrated or what have you, the journey to being made new begins with letting go of the old that has no place in the now.
When you let go of what is not for you, you automatically grab hold of what is truly for you because energy never dies, it simply changes form! To do this is to be reborn and to be reborn is to die and it all rests upon the awareness of what to hold onto and what to let go of, what is correct for you and what is incorrect for you in your own evolutionary process of self-discovery and self awareness!
This takes practice. Notice that in the middle of the word practice is the word "act." You don't have to be a bible thumper to appreciate the timeless wisdom in the sayings, "Faith without works is dead and be ye transformed by a renewing of your mind."
It was a process that conditioned you away from who you really are, that stripped you of your "royal and divine" birth rights, your true universal uniqueness, so it will be a process to be made new and this process requires work within and without!
Case in point, I've always noticed, very early on, how the very simplicity of life is what makes it so complex. We have two of almost everything; feet, legs, hands, arms, ears, eyes, lips, nostrils, but, out of the seven windows in our heads, we've only got one mouth with one tongue! I see this as somehow being part of nature's instructions on how to live as who and what we are and that is, walking, working, lifting, seeing, smelling, hearing, listening, watching, and seeing...all of these we should do TWICE as much as we run our mouths! How? Practice what you preach and preach what you practice!
The difference between being and seeing is simple. To seem requires you to try and do something or be something, but being is completely different. Being means getting out of your own way and allowing the magic of everyday life to emerge. To do this you must be present, in the Now! If you get hung up on the future or the past, you'll completely miss the present. If you get caught up on what you don't have, you'll throw away all that you do! Ad if you spend all of your time trying to be who and what you're not, you run the risk of forever losing who and what you really are!
The moment you see that each day you awaken and are still alive is another opportunity to realize your worth, another shot at cracking the combination to your soul's vault and laying claim to the wealth within you and the wealth around you, another chance to, with two hands, embrace the greater you, each and everyday is never the same and that person is forever new!
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