I Am Therefore I Am

I just opened my journal, only to realize that I have not written anything in heaven knows how long. So much for my commitment to my mastermind group!

The last few months have been a period of unspeakable languor, weariness, and tedium for me. All wounds were re-opened, and I have had to deal with memories best forgotten. The worst is finding myself stuck in this place. Finding myself in stasis, unable to move, neither forward nor on.

It is awful, this feeling, being the fly stuck in the spider’s web looking at the spider’s mandibles as it approaches. Worse, I am unable (or perhaps unwilling) to get myself loose from the sticky strands of fear and the past.

Me, so proud of my detachment and equanimity, find myself stuck. Me, the one who so triumphantly crowed that I had overcome the angst of being myself, find me right back where I was, the lost twenty-year-old.

How has this happened? Is it possible that the past is always with us (me)? Will who I was then always define who I am now? Who I will be thence?

I am therefore I am.

René Descartes had it wrong. Perhaps the translator made an error in translation, who knows!

The original read Cogito Ergo Sum. The verb cogito is so much richer than just thinking. It means awareness; it is a richer concept than thinking alone. Saying “I am aware therefore I am” makes a lot more sense. Thinking is only one aspect of being. Awareness encompasses all aspects of being human, of living, loving, experiencing, and thinking.

Descartes belief was that there was a distinction between the human soul and the body. He proposed that humans were a union of mind and body, distinct but closely joined. A human was a composite entity of mind and body. He gave priority to the mind, arguing that the mind could exist without the body, but the body could not exist without the mind.

Yet, there is no separation in what makes me, well, me. There’s no space between my body, mind, or my spirit. I am who am, a single entity; a spiritual being having a human experience. And so are we all.

Our bodies react to our spiritual health, to our thoughts. The ailments of the body affect our thoughts and the way we see the world, with either hope or despair, or anything in between.

But fear, my fear, threatens my ability to move forward today. I need to be assertive, to stand up and be counted. I cannot be shy about sharing my gifts with the world. How to connect to the inner core of strength that I know is inside me? How to re-emerge into the me I was but six months ago? The one connected to the Numinous, the one who was eternal and not afraid to die.

I am who am.