You can be whatever you want (if you’re willing to accept what that is)

The first part of this post is excerpted from The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield.

Do you have kids?

Then you know that not one of them popped out as tabula rasa, a blank slate. Each came into this world with a distinct and unique personality, an identity so set that you can fling stardust and great balls of fire at it and not morph it by one micro-dot. Each kid was who he was. Even identical twins, constituted of the exact same genetic material, were radically different from Day One and always would be.

Personally I’m with Wordsworth:

Our birth is but a sleep and forgetting:

The soul that rises with us, our life’s start,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come,

From God who is our home.

In other words, none of us are born as passive generic blobs waiting for the world to stamp its imprint on us. Instead, we show up possessing already a highly refined and individuated soul.

Another way of thinking of it is this: We’re not born with unlimited choices.

We can’t be anything we want to be.

We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we’re stuck with it.

Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.

If we were born to paint, it’s our job to become a painter.

If we were born to raise and nurture children, it’s our job to become a mother.

If we were born to overthrow the order of ignorance and injustice of the world, it’s our job to realize it and get down to business.

(Thus, ends the rant/quote from Steven Pressfield)

What about free will?

First, I would say that we did choose what we wanted to be when we incarnated into this life. While we are certainly under no obligation to fulfill our pre-incarnation wishes, we are WIRED to do so. Programmed even (which is what I see when I look at an astrological chart).  Our deepest calling, the whispers in our brains, the gut instincts that seem to make no logical sense – that is our wiring. We can ignore our chosen purpose. As I wrote in another post, you can use a riding lawnmower to take you to and from the grocery store but it’s going to work best when you use it to do what it was designed to do.

Yesterday, I quoted God (from Conversations with God), “Your Life proceeds out of your intentions for it.”

When our intentions are in alignment with our purpose, what we “call forth” is crystal clear. When we send contradictory signals, however, we quickly create a mess.

I’ve frequently written about the incessant, “write, write, write” chant in my head.  Over the past 41 years, I’ve sometimes listened to it, and often, ignored it. When I did listen, I did it only half-assed, and tried to force my writing into my preconception of what it means to be a writer. I tried and tried and tried to write creative fiction. I was always frustrated. Meanwhile, I was cranking out research papers, and technical manuals and other non-fiction without a second thought. It took a psychic to say, “you should be writing non-fiction,” for me to realize that I was writing all along.

But still, I find myself putting energy into many other endeavors. Last week, I uncovered an underlying belief that “people can’t make money as a writer.” So, up until now, I haven’t even TRIED to make money as a writer. I assumed I had to make money in other ways. At the time that I excavated this belief, I was returning from a trip to Wal-mart. (I have some of my deepest insights while driving.) I went to the store for bread. But, of course, I bought a bunch of other stuff. When I got home, I realized I didn’t have the bread! I had bought it (saw it on my receipt) but I guess the bag never made it into the cart. I had brought home other useful things but not the ONE thing I really needed. Not the one thing that I had gone to the store to buy. (Bread, by the way, generally symbolizes “the basic needs of life.”)

I’ve spent my life engaged in lots of interesting and useful occupations. But, until recently, I’ve avoided the ONE THING I came into this life to do.

What about you?