I live in the future.
Sometimes five minutes ahead. Sometimes five hours. Sometimes five years. My mind is constantly asking: What’s next? What will this lead to? What are the implications of this? How do I make this better?
I wake up and thoughts immediately start flooding in. What should I write this week’s newsletter about? What intervention would work best with that client? What do I need to build next?
Yesterday, during one of our men’s group meetings, someone shared that he is constantly replaying conversations from work. How he delivered something in a meeting, what he said to his boss, whether he came across the right way. Another member shared that he often thinks about how he could have been more articulate in conversation, especially because he is in law school and lawyers are expected to be sharp, quick, and well-spoken.
I imagine you have your own version of this.
Maybe yours is future-oriented. Maybe yours is past-oriented. Maybe you are constantly planning who you need to become, or constantly reviewing who you failed to be. Either way, the pattern is similar.
We are often more concerned with who we could be than with being who we are.
The Paradox of Becoming
In many ways, that is noble. It is ambitious. It is part of the path toward self-actualization.
Carl Jung famously wrote, “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
When I read that line, my attention immediately goes to the word become.
That word pulls at me. It challenges me. It calls me toward my better nature. It shines a light on my insufficiencies and makes me want to outwork them. It makes me think about discipline, effort, responsibility, growth, and all the ways I have not yet become the man I am capable of being.
But the paradox in Jung’s wisdom is that we are becoming who we already are.
That means there is something within us that is not merely invented through achievement, discipline, or self-improvement. There is something we carry with us that we are trying to get back in touch with, bring forth, and make manifest.
Of course, that takes work. We have to peel back layers. We have to mature. We have to confront our defenses, our fears, our wounds, our laziness, our pride, and our self-deception. But we also have to be quiet enough to notice that there is something there in the first place.
You cannot hear your inner voice if your life is too loud.
Being and Becoming Need Each Other
Our true nature is something we simultaneously build and reveal to ourselves. We are not simply manufacturing an identity from scratch, and we are not waiting around for some hidden self to magically appear. We become ourselves through a strange combination of effort and surrender, discipline and attention, movement and stillness.
Being and becoming are not mutually exclusive. They are tethered to each other in a way we often overlook.
If you are single-mindedly focused on becoming, you may never actually become your true self because your life is too noisy to hear its voice. You are always optimizing, analyzing, comparing, planning, performing, and preparing. You may become more impressive, more efficient, and more productive, while also becoming more estranged from yourself.
But if you are only focused on being, you may never do the work required to cultivate what is inside of you. Your nature needs effort. It needs friction. It needs feedback. It needs responsibility. It needs to be shaped by the world so it can mature into something useful, grounded, and capable of benefiting others.
Practicing Both
For those of us who default toward becoming, the practice is learning how to quiet things down enough to be with ourselves. For me, that has recently meant doing some of my commutes in silence instead of being on the phone or listening to podcasts the entire time. No input. No attempt to make the drive useful, just silence.
And, honestly, it has been uncomfortable.
But it has also allowed thoughts, feelings, and memories to graze my consciousness that I had not noticed in a long time. Little things from childhood. People I miss. Ideas that needed space to breathe.
For those who are more comfortable with being and struggle more with becoming, the practice is different. You may need to ask: What problems keep calling my attention? What issues in the world bother me more than they seem to bother other people?
The problems you notice in the world often reveal something about your nature. But noticing is not enough, and at some point, your nature has to be developed through action.
You do not become yourself by rejecting who you are, and you do not become yourself by refusing to grow. You become yourself by learning how to listen deeply enough to know what is there, and then working faithfully enough to bring it into the world.
So maybe the question is not whether you are being or becoming.
Maybe the question is whether your becoming is still connected to your being.
Hack of the week: Curbside check-in
If you’re flying with kids, use curbside check-in whenever it’s available. Tip the guy a few bucks, hand off the suitcase, stroller bag, and car seat before you even walk inside, and spare yourself from dragging half your house through the terminal.
