We stagnate. We live in our tiny lives and can barely cope. We live from 9 to 5 and burn through weekends, and before we know it, another year has passed. Another year has passed and nothing has changed. Another year has passed and we haven’t grown. Change. Change is what we need. Change is what you need to help you grow. Change is what you need to find yourself.
Travel
We all know that travelling helps you grow. By stepping out of your home and meeting new people, going to new lands and experiencing new cultures, you somehow gain the side effect of finding yourself. No wait, I should write that as “finding your self“. It’s an odd process, a process where you leave behind most of your material goods as well as the community that gives you your social status.
Leaving all that behind, you’re left bare and empty in a land where no one knows you. You’re also left with a deep awareness of who exactly you are, once all belongings and social status are removed. The only thing you can rely on then is your self. In this awareness, you find yourself.
There was a great poem I came across once, but I’ve long since forgotten the words and the author. It went something like this:
I looked in the mirror and found only illusions,
I looked in my heart and found only desires,
I looked in my soul and found only dreams,
I stepped outside and found myself.
If you find a poem that sounds similar, please tell me so I can put the original here and give proper credit.
Changing work
You’ve worked in the same place for years. You’ve repeated the same routine for years. You can do it all in your sleep. Yes, it’s a job where there’s a lot of work, but how much of that work is new? You need something fresh and new to stimulate your mind, stimulate your senses. The moment you move to a new workplace, new challenges abound. You get to fully test yourself, to see if you can overcome the new set of challenges that come with the job. Can you adapt? Can you survive? And once you do, another pillar strengthens in your self-esteem and you understand that there’s more to yourself than you thought before. You find yourself.
Finding yourself
Finding yourself isn’t like finding a dollar at the side of the road. You don’t suddenly find it and it’s over. No. It’s more like finding out the size and shape of a piece of furniture in the dark. You walk slowly and bump into one side painfully. Then you feel the edge and move along, slowly understanding the shape and size of it. It’s only after you’ve felt all around it that you come to understand that it’s a big desk with a vase on top.
Finding yourself is the same. You push yourself and understand your limits in one way, then you do the same thing by pushing yourself in another direction. Without the constant push and change, you would only ever feel one side of yourself in the dark. You would never know your true self and just how far you can go. But to see how far you can go, you have to see if you can adapt, and to do that, you have to change your environment. Change it, and see how you yourself react. That will tell you who you are. That will tell you what you truly value in life once everything else is removed.
As you go through these changes, the only thing you’ll have left to rely on is yourself. And every time you fall back on yourself, you start to trust yourself a little more. It builds up. As time goes on, you not only see yourself better, that image becomes more and more vivid and becomes something almost tangible. This self-image, more than your belongings or social status, is what will define you then.
When you can walk into a new environment, armed with nothing but your own inner confidence, then you have something going for you. In the words of Rudyard Kipling:
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run –
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!
– “If” by Rudyard Kipling