A New Me
What do you do when you feel like you finally know what to do with your life? When you know how to really live, how to change things and be the person you want to be? What do you do when you know exactly who you want to be… the new you?
I know who I want to be. There is not a particular career or identity that I want. What I want is to be holy. I want to love and give with the grace that comes only when one clings to nothing.
I do not want to live in the privileged world that allows me to think that my problems are oh-so-important. I do not want to say “I can’t afford that luxury” because I am spending my time and money on different pleasures while others go without clean water.
Some days it seems as if this person whom I want to be may really be. There is hope and freedom and an asceticism which is far too delicious to be called self-denial. I am so caught up in the beauty of what may be that it seems that it really is me and that I will live well. It will be a good life!
And so I follow Tolstoy’s efforts with the attention of one who reads her own story:
He regarded the reforming of economic conditions as nonsense, but he had always felt the injustice of his abundance as compared with the poverty of the people, and he now decided that, in order to feel himself fully in the right, though he had worked hard before and lived without luxury, he would now work still harder and allow himself still less luxury. All this seemed so easy to do that he spent the whole way in the most pleasant dreams. With a cheerful feeling of hope for a new, better life, he drove up to his house between eight and nine in the evening.
And find to my chagrin that it is indeed my story.
[...]When he saw it all, he was overcome by a momentary doubt of the possibility of setting up that new life he had dreamed of on the way. All the traces of his life seemed to seize hold of him and say to him: ‘No, you won’t escape us and be different, you’ll be the same as you were” with doubts, an eternal dissatisfaction with yourself, vain attempts to improve, and failures, and an eternal expectation of the happiness that has eluded you and is not possible for you.’
As long as I am eating only lentils and split peas and going to sleep early on a hard floor it seems quite easy for me to live well. But just add back in a little internet and ice cream. Give me bookshelves and bring out the dehydrator and make me feel at home. Suddenly I am only a step away from a microwave and ipod and wii and all those things which seem so normal and necessary. After all, everyone else has one. It is not like it is even cutting edge indulgence. And it is not as if I can see the people who die because of my choices.
And when I no longer see those whom I could love I no longer see the me I want to be. All I feel is the me who is here now; the one who prefers to drive rather than to take the bus, the one who is too lazy to possibly help you achieve the new you.
Why, oh why, must self-indulgence come at the cost of heaven on earth? Hope has a bitter taste when it is a replacement for goodness hear and now.
Loving without limits is something I’m struggling with and striving for …and reminding myself that it is about the journey more than the destination. It matters less that I take time for myself as that when my daughter wants another book read that I read with generous spirit.
I think Internet and ice cream are only hinderances to generosity if you let them.
I agree. But some of us (me!) are weaker and thus easily let little things distract us from generosity.
Beautiful post. Living a simplistic life is very honorable. Wii and ipods are very over-rated, so I think.
Thanks.
I came across this gem from St Theophan the Recluse (in the Orthodox Church) today that I think shares the sentiment of your post.
“It is necessary for us to live as God created us, and when someone does not live this way, I may confidently state that he does not live at all.”
Good quote!
My husband and I talk about this all the time. I won’t lie and say that we are the best but we are trying. I think the TV and the laptops and game systems really hinder family development and a serious talk is coming soon about whether or not we will want any of that in our home. My mom came the other day and was appalled that we didn’t have a microwave or any proccessed boxed food. I told her, “You know..There was a day not so long ago that if you had those things, it was gastly…What happened to the time where making food was normal and the boxed crap was abnormal?” -She just stared at me.
“I won’t lie and say that we are the best but we are trying.”
That is exactly how I feel.
Beautiful post Rae. I’m currently reading War and Peace. It’s taking me forever.