Who Am I vs. What Do I Want

Questions for the Angels.

Paul Simon wrote a beautiful song called “Questions for the Angels” that perhaps serves as a nice little meditation gong for where we’re going today. I don’t know why it felt relevant, perhaps because it outlines an accurate part of the human experience which is the “longing” we feel to orient our lives toward something larger — a purpose or service. The questions we ask matter. Angels are not necessarily little cherubs in the sky either. Perhaps they’re the ones who have passed and still speak or our higher selves hiding in the invisible realm — almost within reach but waiting for our invitation.

Either way, today I will explore the question of Who Am I and my intentions to lead with that one over the highly popular question that pervades culture nowadays: What Do I Want?

I invite you to first marinate in the beautiful song linked below, then read on for a little reflection on the agency we always have to chose a different internal compass for our lives.

A pilgrim on a pilgrimage
Walked across the Brooklyn Bridge
His sneakers torn
In the hour when the homeless move their cardboard blankets
And the new day is born

Folded in his backpack pocket
The questions that he copied from his heart
Who am I in this lonely world?
And where will I make my bed tonight?
When twilight turns to dark

Questions for the angels
Who believes in angels?
Fools do
Fools and pilgrims all over the world

The overarching question that come at us from our modern culture, as I perceive it, is: What Do I Want?

We hear it in many contexts:

The job interview: “Well, tell me, what do you want?”

The late night conversation between partners: “Babe, what do you really want?”

The friend sympathetically offering advice over coffee: “I guess it just comes down to what you want”

It can be a crippling question and one that stupefies a lot of us — even those who may had a clear purpose or gifting that was made very clear to them from an early age.

Being someone who leaned that way in my early life, it has not made me exempt from asking that same question many times over in my life — maybe especially in the moments where all my supposed “dreams” have come true.

Lately… I am finding myself less interested in the question “what do I want” and more interested in the question: “who am I?’ and ‘who do I want to be?’

What if, in focusing on this part of life first, we actually cultivate the very state that can attract the things we want? And what if it only happens when we let go of our desire for the latter?

My feeling is that in being the person we want to be, we will bring about the changes we want to see in the external world around us. Not overnight — but in collaboration with time, starting first with the internal work and then watching how the universe conspires to bring people, places and opportunities toward us that sync up with the vibrational orbit we are starting to embody and make incarnate somehow.

It does all sound a bit woo woo, doesn’t it? But these ideas and concepts have been present in the lexicon of religious and esoteric teachers for centuries. I always feel limited in my language to express myself in the realm of “spiritual sciences” but in service to the larger point, I will have to at times employ words that have gathered the sediment of New Age cliché or tired religious associations and I wish it wasn’t necessary. I do think these words can benefit from a rehabilitation into new contexts, however, as it can illuminate their original meaning once more. But in the end, our words serve only as fingers pointing to the moon.

A teacher of mine, Quanita, told me that when are in flow or alignment, the internal work can actually feel very difficult (seems surprising?) but the external world can feel easy. Things may fall effortlessly into place — and you wonder why (when things appear to be going so well) am I so shaken with grief and a swelling bombardment of reappearing wounds that insist on being attended to?

It is our courage to face this internal work that proves to the universe (who hates a void, I hear) that we are moving, evolving, shedding what is no longer needed for the journey and preparing ourself for the awakening of new faculties and the experiences that serve to refine them. People might fall away and new ones emerge. Even as we might continue to face great anguish inside, we may also see that blessings are being made extremely evident in the midst of it all.

The deeper the pain, the deeper the joy.

We are aiming here for the path of least resistance. Harmony with nature. The path of well-being, the path that creates enough safety for us to be who we really are — but it usually requires an act of surrender to the resistance that rises up from within. It may also require a giving up of “things” and “wants” and “desires” and “outcomes” and instead, dutifully committing to the values we want to embody before expecting them to arrive from the outside.

The beliefs we once held have this profound ability to change. To fully change. But they leave their imprints behind and we have to stay committed to feeding the mind with a new story. We can’t change thoughts through immediate replacement. As I’ve experienced it, we do it through addition. Research also suggests we have an evolutionary disposition toward negative thoughts so it’s not so easy to remove our wiring in this way, however, through adding to the thoughts that plague us with positive ones, a new set of thoughts can settle into the bloodstream of our consciousness, gradually becoming the more dominant pathway. Like the practice of religious chanting, daily scripture readings and contemplating the Tao — whatever the practice may be, they are intended to take hold of our minds. Intended to be digested, metabolized, spiritually alchemised and mentally fortified then calcified through action in our life.

Until I can still my mind, I cannot hear my body. Until I reconnect (everyday, seventy times seven) with my spirit and rebuke the language of fear (which constricts my hearts ability to love) I cannot tame the mind. They move in relationship.

It seems our beings themselves are a reflection of that renowned religious “Trinity.”

And yet, these religious symbols and words are only reaching approximations of the experienced harmony that awaits the human being who can listen and recall the “great tune” sung from the centre of themselves.

Who am I? At my core.

Who do I want to be? At my core.

These questions must not be confused with:

Who am I through the eyes of others?

Who am I when I get the things I want?

Those questions have already assumed that only our external circumstances will dictate who we are.

If, who we are, is not equipped to accommodate the things we want, the great law of attraction will not work. What we seek we will not find. What we want cannot make a home with us because we haven’t built the house yet!

The beautiful thing about these questions is, they are not set to a timeline.
They’re intentions that set the pace of our becoming.

Missing the mark…

In striving only for what we want we tend to forget who we are, who we were and who we actually want to be.

It seems we called to live within limitation while seeking to transcend it (or evolve) and remove the illusions that arrive regularly on our path. I wonder if this talk of illusion comes close to the original meaning of “sin” or what the Jewish tradition calls “missing the mark.”

In other words, the great forgetting.

So, what if we asked ourself each day, in efforts to not forget…

Who am I? What makes up the core tenants of who I am and who I want to be? How am I prepared to return to these things when I inevitably stray from them?

In this reframe, we choose to abandon what we want and ask instead, for what we need — in order to become.

It feels so counter cultural to wire ourselves in this way. In a world that constantly tells you should want and therefore what you do want and must have in order to satiate that urge.

But one thing that no one can tell you or sell you is, who you are.

So guard it, examine it and don’t just believe it. Know it.

If I’m saying all this, I should at least start with me, I want to be…

loving.
courageous.
creative.
oriented toward service.
kind.
patient.
well in mind, body, spirit.

In working toward being these things (the powerful announcement of “I Am”) we tell the invisible realms that we are ready to receive those things from the world around us. But we do it without expectation of this — just a simple trust in the laws at work when we start from the right place.

My feeling is that the outcomes we desire will fail to authentically manifest outwardly until the qualities we need to properly steward them are embedded and embroidered into the fabric of who we are. This is why the soil requires the qualities of good health for roots to take hold and fruiting trees to emerge.

Time is our friend in this great task. We cannot pin her down or demand that she shapes our life in a certain way and by a certain date. But we can move with her loyal and circular daily progressions, building a steady hand for softly knocking on the door of eternity until she deems us ready to proceed.

As the year wraps up and we set off into new terrains, could we ask less for outcomes and instead for the courage to ask: who am I and who do I want to be?

may we first gain the eyes to see
the person we want to be
the ears to hear
what is being said within
the full heart that is open
to receive
not only what it wants
but who it has always been