One of my biggest creative hindrances is thinking I owe it to everyone to be the same today as I was yesterday.
I have been thinking about how God calls Himself “I Am.” How interesting that He is always in the present. Always in the now.
When I think about defining who “I am” and wanting that to look more and more seamless with who God is, I see that “I am” constantly a new creation. I am not who I was last year, last week, last night, even two minutes ago. “I am” who “I am” right now. So I don’t have to be pegged into a label, and I don’t owe it to anyone to be consistent with the person I was last week. The only consistent is change. The only consistent is becoming who “I am,” unified with the one who always is who He is meant to be. There is mess in a me that is always changing. There is movement. There is adventure.
It is a declaration of courage to boldly say this is who I am in this moment because it takes a confidence in oneself to decree such a thing with certainty. Far easier to say “This is who I was told to be,” or “This is who you think I am,” or “This is who I wish I was,” than to say, feet firmly planted on the ground and chin up, “This is precisely who I am.” And in the next moment to shake all the leaves off of that last moment, and to adjust, hands on hips and say, “Now, this is exactly who I am!”
“The…terror that scares us from self trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loathe to disappoint them.”
“If you would be a man, speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day.”
“Let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical.”
“You shall be consistent in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem.”
“The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
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