To Be or Not to Be

To be or not to be.  That is still the question.  

Suspend your opinions for now that one is necessarily better than the other. Let’s explore, instead, how some of us fulfill our callings by negation (by what we give up), and others by what we embrace (what we take on). 

To Be 

The person of action (The Entrepreneur) is one who embraces vision.  With great passion they decidedly move toward a vision to create reality.  In the fervor of such a pursuit, they can easily wrap their entire identity around this venture.

Not To Be 

The problem with this, obvious to the person of being (The Mystic), is that no matter how passionately one is committed to their work, it cannot ultimately define them.  It might be simpler if it could. But our work alone is not enough to define the mystery of our human being “ness.”

These more spiritually attune and self-aware people ;-) choose the way of negation (not to be).  Knowing the limitation of work to define us, they choose instead to define by what we lack, or what we intentionally choose to deny.

It's far less messy this way.  It is much cleaner to define ourselves by what we deny or reject.  There is more clarity being removed.  As the great line in the movie A Beautiful Mind goes, "certainty is the luxury of those on the sideline." 

If absolute certainty or clarity is your goal, stay on the sideline.

However, if you are willing to risk failure, to give up being understood, to let go of what you think you know to learn something new…there may be something far better than certainty out there.

Try

We can try. Because it seems only in trying can we release the good stuff of life. Being right is great.  And having competency is important, but perhaps not as important as we think.  

The awkward flight of trying, with all our flawed attempts and pushing on things that can not be pushed, is where we learn.  That frailty and humility is where we find the seedlings of the future we dream about.  

Our initial impotence is the beginning of our competence.  

If we are willing to knock, we can get in.  The door is always open.  It may seem locked, it is not; this door can only be locked from the outside.  But we may have to keep on knocking to get in.