HUMILITY MONTH: DAY 19: “You sit in these halls with a crown upon your head, and yet you are less of a man than you have ever been.”― J. R. R. Tolkien
The world will recognize us only as they can label us. This is the problem with cultural references in our social order.
Without a title, who are we? Being a spiritual being is not enough for our culture. That is why it remains so dysfunctional and broken. We must find ways to navigate this disparate system and remain focused on recovery and finding a spiritual path for ourselves.
We have many titles in this culture. They vary from relational labels such as Father, Sister, Uncle, etc. to identify and pigeon-hole us in cultural terms with which we are all familiar. However, there are as many varieties of people filling these roles as there are people. Defining, within a spiritual context what it means to be a “Mother” is something few of us have done, but must visit this task in order to know how to BE one if that is our situation.
Then there are other labels such as the racial definitions which are undergoing some revamping in our current social order. As are those labels for sexual identification. It can get very confusing for all of us. Even then, we are not fully capable of either labelling another person appropriately, or understanding how these labels apply to us.
Then there are the descriptive labels used to identify what we do with our time away from these relational settings. We might be Boss, Truckdriver, Circus performer, Salesman, Doctor, and many, many others. Does this actually tell the world who we are? No! Lots of different kinds of Boss in this world, aren’t there? Yeah, and I know the differences between the Ring Master and a Clown in the circus, but even when the jobs are very similar, there are literally hundreds of kinds of Doctors in the world. And one title does not begin to tell us who each one is.
Being a human is a big job. That is the only title I can allow myself to live into fully. It means I may have a lot of other descriptions, but none of them is complete, because we cannot be pigeon-holed, nor can any descriptive words do a complete job of telling someone else who I am. That is something I either know or do not know within my heart. Recovery has given me the lens to see myself differently as time goes on. And yet, there is still much to be discovered about me and life and the universe around me. Isn’t that fun?
Dolphin Hug 