What life is about for most of us is a search for ourselves. We want to know who we are. And how to define ourselves to others. So we spend our lives finding out.

We are looking for a personal hub that holds us together as the wheels of our lives keep turning.

We CHANGE, we accept CHANGE, we want CHANGE. No healthy person wants to be stuck forever with what he or she was in the past. Or is now. If we don't CHANGE we get stale, complacent, and mired in our sins and miseries. But if we don't hold ourselves together while we CHANGE, we lose our balance.

Let me speak for myself. I want my life to be more like a continuous line__than a series of unconnected dots.....

A curved line, yes, a line that twists and turns around a thousand corners, but still, somehow, stays connected all the while.

I want a links and contacts between my yesterdays and my tomorrows. Growth, yes, change, of course, but what a zany life it would be if I couldn't recognize my real self in Tue images of my past.

It is a miracle, sort of, that the boy I see on a wrinkled snapshot, that scrawny matchstick with pants on, skinny as a baby sparrow, is actually the same person as the silver old bird writing this sentence. How remarkable, and yet how important to me, that I and that clothespole are one and the same person.

But the CHANGES we pass through are not the only reason we keep searching for the abiding self we are.

We are so confoundingly complicated. And confused.

One of me is a wily rake; the other is a simple saint. One of me is laughingly healthy; the other is a pouting neurotic. One of me is romantic, sighing for the perfect love; the other is a practical realist, content to live faithfully, if imperfectly. One of me is vulgar enough to shock my best friends; the other is refined enough to get along in all the proper places. One of me is a true believer; the other is a wondering doubter. I carry such contradictions within myself that I must confuse the angels.

But where is the real me?

I would know my real self better if I could just be more consistent, more simple, put together so all the parts nicely fit.

Where can we find our enduring selves beneath all our metamorphoses and conflicts?

In have come to the conclusion that we find our real self in the continuing stories we are writing with our lives.

We are all writing our stories; and each of us has to write his or her own. I cannot write my parents' stories, any more than they could have written mine. I cannot write my children's stories, though there have been times that I have wanted to. I can write only mine.

The trick is to write a continuing story. A story with a plot that has a central character. Not a collection of unconnected episodes about a collection of unconnected characters.

Writing a continuing story out of my life depends on whether I dare to make commitments to people and care enough to keep the commitments I make. And whether I accept other people's commitments to me as gifts that contribute to my story.

In fact, who we are always begins with somebody's commitment to us.

Who am I? I am Betty Palaran's boy. I have an identity because a woman(my mother) committed herself to me when I was "mewling and puking" in her arms, a sickly, bawling, undernourished, skin-and-bones baby. I am somebody because a woman was there for me, touching me, feeding me, warming me, hushing me, and letting me believe that she would be there for me again, and again, when I needed her.

And I have a self because of the woman who kept her commitment to me.

It is not as though I always accepted her commitment to me as the raw material for the beginning of my story. I often demanded-as a condition for accepting her-that she be a different person than the real, complicated human beings she was.

I did not want her to be a woman who could not provide me to be a father. I did not want her to be gone away from home, working so hard and getting so tired that she had to dig terribly deep to mine

Let's have a coffee

Harry01

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