Towards an authentic future

A Short story

Some time ago, during one of my trips to the bookstore, I came across a small book that had previously escaped my attention: The art of aging by Schopenhauer. That evening, I started to leaf through it and as I went through the pages, my eyes lingered on the following sentence: “All men want to live, but no one knows why he lives.” I immediately settled on these words before agreeing silently. In fact, even if the absolute has no place in human affairs to the point of saying that no one knows why he lives, there is still a time in our life when we can lose sight of our reason for being, so that Schopenhauer's statement can inspire interesting thoughts.

“Knowing why we live” goes hand in hand with setting a goal while engaging in all the efforts and resources necessary to achieve it. This is how accomplishment rhymes with becoming without this value being fixed in time. Therefore, the stakes are high because, through this existential premise, humans try to achieve their goals in life while achieving happiness. Otherwise, we would be faced with a wandering individual who would not regain a taste for life not knowing which direction to choose. It is true that in the absence of meaning in the activities and roles we undertake in life, our human nature would be condemned to a kind of void.

On the subtleties of becoming

Becoming is said of anything that changes, that is transformed and that moves in such a way that it constantly escapes any attempt at identification. Becoming is an open whole, an arrangement of interdependent elements whose impetus escapes the notion of identity. It is in this sense that the future of someone, for example, Mary's life, is closely related to the unpredictability and contingency of “human matter” (in this case, the story of Mary), and of her participation in the “cosmic matter”. For example, Mary may choose to become a doctor at the age of eighteen but, after fifteen years of career in medicine, she may decide to stop working as a doctor to devote herself to her passion for music. At that moment she will integrate another form of life, another daily routine, another way of being, since she will undertake another path; she will pass from her status of “becoming a doctor” to the status of “becoming a musician”. On the other hand, not everything is subject to becoming. If we take the example of a geometric shape, it does not resist identification as a person who is subject to the contingency of reality. A geometric shape cannot become anything other than what it already is. For example, the essence of the triangle calls for a kind of fixity or formal “security” linked to the system of which it is a part (geometry). In this sense, we cannot talk about the future of a triangle, since the latter is an essential element drawn from a closed set, governed and protected by the rules of abstraction.

Becoming is neither positive nor negative, neither good nor bad. Becoming does not have a moral qualification. Attributing moral value to someone's future is a data that disorients and distorts the essence of the term. Systematizing the future means integrating it into an ethical model in accordance with the social norm according to which any type of activity becomes a product or a service under a commercial label. However, despite the correctness of this statement, it is not so simple to defuse the moral nuance of human becoming, the reason being that, any action that appears in social space-time, is automatically transformed into a social fact “depending” on its environment. Therefore, it will instead be necessary to deal with a hybrid vision of becoming: the combination of the effects of moral duty on the desire to become as such (end in itself).

In the eyes of an old sage, when a human being's joy of life is threatened by the execution of principles that are hollow and inadequate in relation to the meaning of one's own existence, it is necessary to question the quality of one's life and the place given to happiness (the nuances of one's future). From the perspective of happiness, it would be desirable to find a fair measure while aiming at duty as a quest for ethics within oneself and in line with the environment that we wish to create around us, rather than as an exercise in accordance with the social recipes of the “good citizen”. The desire to be socially irreproachable gives rise to the unfortunate habit of replacing the desire or the joy of a meaningful achievement with calculation and the care of “appearing in the eyes of others”, which would further distance us from our own aspirations.

How can this be remedied?

Do I have to banish ethical duty from my vocabulary in order to become who I really am?

‍

Seize your future

Beyond the cosmic laws that determine our existence in space-time (exteriority), there are two other forces that govern our future: willpower and imagination (interiority). Willpower is a person's disposition that defines their energy, consistency, and power to act toward an end. Epictetus said that the will being within everyone, it is a faculty that we have full control over. Therefore, no one can deprive us of our will, because we are fully responsible for its activity. Imagination, on the other hand, is a faculty that our mind has in order to represent itself or to form images. Imagination reflects our ability to develop new ideas and create original situations that involve an infinite number of possibilities. Imagination is an inexhaustible source of inspiration that is not limited to what language can express. Our imagination invents, designs, and creates everything we can dream of. It is an engine of creation, but also a principle for the realization of our intentions transposed into the physical world.

Willpower and imagination prepare, update and nourish the future. Therefore, to grasp your future is to tame your body and mind through your connection with the cosmic being. This is how becoming appeals to our senses and reflects our various “sensory states”, the fruit of our participation in the being of the world. What we become in space-time and through the various actions that we undertake, makes us a flow of multiple achievements, a tangible proof of a physical continuity marked by all sorts of affects that reach us deep within ourselves. In this sense, the momentum of our future navigates both in the physical world and in the social framework in which our existence is embedded. Even though reason allows a more or less accurate representation of what we desing our future to be, the latter remains a vague combination of our inner signature and our social existence, which gives it an element of mystery that resists any form of analysis.

‍

Investigation data

If becoming is an “impure” mixture of what drives us from within and the social convention that binds us to others, how can we know if we are living up to our aspirations? How can we detect the “inauthentic” part of our lives, caused by our need to belong in a whole and to communicate with others? If we expect a ready-made answer, it is true that disappointment will not take long to occupy our minds. There is no magic recipe for how we “manage” the state of our present and the fate of our future. On the other hand, a set of elements to be questioned can contribute to our quest:

• Work on the presence of ourselves, that is, to listen to what is happening in our heart at the level of the relationship body (affects) -heart(emotions) -wits(thoughts)

• Have the courage to accept a “bad” choice or an inadequate decision in order to get back on the path of our own desires

• Realize that the path traveled that designates one's future is by no means a misconduct, but a part of the journey that leads us to discover ourselves

‍

Let's go back to our short story from the beginning. Schopenhauer. The art of aging, which is nothing more but the art of becoming. Merging with the original, raw and formless, mysterious and paradoxical future. Becoming who we really are for our own sake and for the sake of others. Becoming real not to please, but to live well; to tame the richness of our talents and not to suffer in the shadow of the unfulfilled. Becoming authentic is the impulse that we draw with our guts; knowing why we live is learning to listen to ourselves, to trust ourselves and to let ourselves be.

Let's be extraordinary, let's become ourselves! :))

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍