“To be yourself in a world that is contstantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

I just finished a webcam visit with my grandsons who live in Atlanta.  I think that Oskar, age 3, must have been reading Emerson this morning; because it was obvious that he is striving to maintain his individuality, in spite of his parents’ efforts to teach him to conform.  Isn’t that the way things work?  We’re born blank slates; and from the moment we need something from another person — usually our mother — we begin to learn how to conform and interact in ways that allow our needs to be met.  Assuming that a child has loving parents who hold his best interest at heart, it is probably a good thing that we spend our first three years soaking up the information we need in order to navigate society.  We learn to give and take.  We learn to be kind if we want kindness in return.  We learn to love in response to the love we are shown.  These are all good things.

What, then, is Emerson talking about when he says our greatest accomplishment is in resisting the world’s attempts to make us something we are not?  The first three years of life, so the experts tell us, lay the groundwork for the way we will live the rest of our lives among other people.  Most four-year-olds I’ve met have no trouble at all being themselves and telling us confidently just who they are.  Let’s fast-forward now to the wonderful age of fourteen.  I happen to have one of those at the moment, so I’m very aware of the struggles of the fourteen-year-old to begin to separate from parental influence and move toward the time when she will declare adult independence and strike out on her own.  How do we do this at age fourteen?  We declare our independence by striving diligengly to conform completely to the unspoken standard of our contemporaries.  We never know for certain who it is that dictates what is “cool” or acceptable.  We only know that our survival in the world is dependent on how well we can portray this acceptable image.  We negotiate.  We manipulate.  We learn to hide parts of ourselves from others in order to assure that people won’t see who we are and reject our individuality.

The question is this:  If we’ve left adolescence behind and actually reached adulthood, why is it that we sometimes persist in feeling the need to deny who we really are and continue to hide behind a facade that we have learned to call acceptable?

Certainly, there is comfort in finding common ground with others.  In friendship, we find a sort of acceptance and approval from people who share our values and possibly share our goals.  It is likely that we all received similar input in those critical first three years of life; and for that we should thank our parents.  What Emerson challenges us to do is to see that groundwork and the blind conformity of adolescence as skills for interacting with others.  I think what he speaks about is the more challenging and enlightening work of learning to lovingly interact with and conform to ourselves.  Isn’t that what makes life interesting?

Each of us has something uniquely our own that we can bring to friendship and bring to the world at large that adds a special kind of color to the tapestry of life.  Let’s all think today of what it is that makes our hearts sing.  Find the songs that others bring to the world and look for the places where your own plays in harmony with that of another.  Once that is accomplished, there is only one thing left to do — REJOICE!