Shaping Ourselves - Part 5- Caring about Becoming
There is a clear distinction between “being” and “becoming.” The two ideas are complementary opposites. Being is existing in a stable state, where we are now. Becoming is changing, where we are going. As humans, we are never simply being, we are always becoming. We determine what we become by what we care about.
Sun Tzu saw becoming in the tangible form of our strategic positions. He taught that the positions we hold are always degrading because climate is a major part of them, and climate is always changing. Positions are a path, always moving. We must keep moving forward toward a goal to build our position. The only alternative to choosing that path is drifting with the currents of life’s river and eventually going over a waterfall.
Caring for Ourselves
Sun Tzu listed “caring” as one of five necessary qualities of a leader. The basis of caring for others is how we care for ourselves. We learn empathy from our desire to play with other children. By understanding what we want, we learn what others desire. Caring for ourselves is our foundation for caring for others. We cannot just care for ourselves the way we are today because we are always changing. We should also love ourselves and others for what we are becoming. A terrifying thought that can also be comforting. Any suffering today is less important than what it can make of us in the future.
Telling ourselves that we should be satisfied with the way we are now is doing ourselves a terrible disservice. It implies that we will never be better than this. If we are feeling miserable, anxious, hopeless, and depressed, we do not want to believe that that is all of life. It can be part of life, but it is never all of it.
We want to be more merciful towards ourselves and others than that. We should certainly be more merciful to our children and grandchildren. None of us should be satisfied or depressed with the way we are now. Our current position is just a place we are passing through. We can be happy or unhappy with that place, but we must always look forward to where we are heading. We should care deeply about what we are becoming. To truly grow, we must embrace what we can become and what those around us can become. Our current state of being is a place from which we are climbing, sliding, or escaping.
Trusting the Future
We want to choose a path that expands who we are. This is the adventure of our lives. We should all want to answer this particular call to adventure. This requires trust in our future. Trustworthiness is another one of Sun Tzu’s aspects of a leader.
Our current culture always forecasts the end of the world, but in order to trust in our futures, we must trust what is real, what we see and hear from the people around us. The news and social media loves every Chicken Little who claims that the sky is falling. I couldn’t count all the calamities predicted during my life. They always fail to appear. What keeps showing up instead is a world that is better by every objective measure. We must teach others, especially our young, that we cannot look to our future with fear and trembling.
We care for ourselves and others by dreaming up a better future. Every dream is a form of role-playing. The roles we play today are the ones we live in the future. Our adventure in living is enabled by the imagining, pretending, and dreaming we do today. It is not possible for all our dreams to come true, at least not exactly as we dream them, but our dreams give our lives their direction.
We must trust that our dreams actually make our lives better, never perfect, but always better. We should trust that today is both the best we have ever been and the worst we will ever be. This is the great truth of human history. A better future is never guaranteed for any individual. Our futures depend on our choices. But most people are tryingt to make good decisions, so, on the average, individual wealth, education, and happiness continue to rise while war, pestilence, and tyranny generally decline. We not only can dream of a better world, but those dreams come true when we trust in our future.
The Weapon of Truth
What is our weapon for caring for ourselves? Truth. Telling the truth and discovering the truth is the way we discover our path into the future.
Why not lie? Lying is a way of avoiding responsibility when we make wrong turns. Can we use lies to manipulate people in the short term? Sometimes, but this strategy cannot be repeated again and again without eventually going wrong. The only people we can fool over and over are fools. Building our position on the basis of what fools think about us is not a practical strategy.
Telling the truth requires trust. We must trust that the positions we build are real. The truth is that we are not born to be victims. We are also not born to be abusers. We humans are not corrupt in our essence any more than we are perfect just the way we are. Being human means that we are born with both the seeds of greatness and the seeds of corruption within us. What we grow into depends on which seeds we choose to feed. Greatness feeds on truth. Corruption feeds on lies. We want to care for ourselves, but who are we, truly?
If we are living a lie, we are not ourselves. If we build our lives based on the lies of others, our lives are always less than they should be. Those touting failed solutions, like those predicting the end of the world, can only keep repeating their lies again and again. They will never admit their lies because their lives are built on them. However, we can stop listening to such people. If we repeat their lies or accept them, we are falsifying our existence, and we are falsifying our world. We may want to impress people. But we are not developing a real position in the real world. We are creating expectations that we cannot satisfy. If something good comes from a lie, it isn’t happening to the real us. It is rewarding the spirit of corruption growing within us. As that spirit of corruption grows, it corrupts more and more aspects of our lives. Eventually, any position we have falls apart.
We can run away from our mistakes and hide them, but we must remember that wherever we go, there we are. If we don’t recognize and show our baggage, we never get rid of it. We still carry it within us. It still comes out in our choices and actions. Some of us go through our entire lives repeating the same problems in job after job, relationship after relationship, and place after place without realizing that our lies to ourselves and others are the only common factor in all of these difficulties.
Truth is a real weapon. It cuts both ways. It teaches us that caring requires being careful. When we share with others what real, what is true, we learn from our failures, and we are rewarded for our successes. We take responsibility for the results of our moves, for better or worse, winning some and learning some. People trust us more when we expose our mistakes. Those who support us know what to expect and never to expect perfection. We work with others whose strengths compensate for our weaknesses and vice versa, but for this to work, others must know our real strengths and weaknesses. The positions the result from this cooperation are solid. We are solid, and people will depend upon us.
Caring and Suffering
We all have or will have pain in our lives. When tragedy strikes, we want to be prepared. We want to become strong enough to bear that pain. We want to be the one that others turn to for support. This means that we must be honest to ourselves about the fact that suffering in some form is unavoidable. Death is real. We all lose loved ones. Sickness and disease are real. The dangers of adventure are real. We do not want to lie to ourselves about the fact that seeking adventure is risky but so is seeking nothing. The waterfall is waiting for those who are just drifting downstream.
We don’t want to continue living in any pain from which we should escape, but there is also something beautiful in surviving pain. Pain has the power to transform us. We cannot survive terrible pain without being changed. The more terrible the pain, the more profoundly it changes us. Suffering is a side of life that we all must endure at one point or another. What offsets the tragedies in life?
The Adventure of Living
When we attempt to lead a better life, we find that our lives get better. Being born a man is a great adventure. Being born a woman is also a great adventure. Sharing those adventure with one another, make both our lives more exciting. No two of these adventures are exactly alike because no two positions are in exactly the same place at the same time. If we live moving forward in our lives, living what is real, we will solve our share of mysteries, see our share of wonders, and encounter our share of surprises. We do this only by choosing the adventure, not hiding from it. Some of these wonders are as old as time, but some are as new and different as each snowflake.
It is always a wild ride, and it can be a fun one, especially if we can avoid feeding any demons. Partaking in what is real is always within our reach.