Day 33 - Who Do You Think You Are... Anyway?

One more week to go.

This is when it begins to dawn on me that there are some things that I am not going to accomplish by the end of this 40 Days and some other things at which I have done very well.

The most significant thing about the whole process, at least as I look at it right now, is the key awareness that awareness is key.

Whatever it is that I have accomplished over the last month, it has been accomplished for one reason only, and that is because I have been paying attention. The most important think I take away from the time, is an intention to keep that focus, that awareness, foremost in my mind. [I was going to correct think to thing in the sentence above, but upon reflection I'm going to let that Freudian slip stand.]

My Merton reading for the day is entitled "Godlikeness Begins at Home" and contains Merton's personal reflection, made in 1958, that the secret to his ambition to "be a saint" is centered and grounded in his basic acceptance of who he is. "Finally, I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be who I already am." He expands on this, not in a way that suggests that there is nothing to be done - the kind of response one might expect from a new age, magical thinking, kind of non-discipline - but rather that the doing is really much simpler than we generally might imagine. He writes, "... I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself - and if I accept myself fully, in the right way, I will have already surpassed myself."

In a separate reading from the collection "Echoing Silence," Merton makes the comment that "... the artist might well be brusquely invited to go home and consider the question: Who do you think you are anyway?" and this to me is central to the whole concept. Each goal, each task, each step along the path of the last month, ultimately comes to this question, and the answer remains the classic Zen conundrum of who is asking whom and is there a self there to answer?

Or to put it more simply still... Perhaps you really are what you do.