A Subtle Shift: From Bettering to Revealing
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.” — T.S. Eliot
We live in a cult of self-improvement where the sole focus is placed on shedding our flawed selves so we can reemerge as giant butterflies from the decaying cocoons of who we were yesterday.
Be warned: it’s in the air and it’s highly contagious.
Everything’s a hustle nowadays — Defining your abs. Jumping on the diet du jour. Getting out of bed three hours before the sun rises so you can #rise and #grind. Vlogging every moment of your life and editing it so it’s vaguely interesting but no less self-involved. Climbing up endless professional ladders. Voraciously stuffing every last morsel of information into your face until you have to take a minute to chew. Stacking degrees as high as your bedside table’s tower of books.
The hustles stretch out to the horizon, as far as the eye can see.
And that’s ok, I have no problem with hustling or all of its delicious fruits. Working hard to attain your goals feels unbelievably fulfilling and is about as close as it gets to creating your own sense of meaning in life.
What I would change is the way it’s all framed:
Framing self-improvement in a way that casts aside who you are right now in favor of what you could become tomorrow sends us all off onto an impossible mission, and the mission’s impossible because there’s no end to it.
Again, I’m not saying you shouldn’t gaze out into your future, plan ahead, or stoke the coals of your ambitions. But there’s got to be a way to look at self-improvement that places a greater value, and emphasis, on where you’re at right now as you pursue a heightened version of yourself.
Otherwise, how can we ascend to the best versions of ourselves if the only place we’ll be able to experience the highest version of ourselves is in the present moment that we’re sacrificing to attain it? How can you tell when you’ve arrived?
Framed in this manner, self-improvement feels like trying to pull yourself out of quicksand.
Instead, why not frame self-improvement in a way that assumes we’re already in possession of the highest version of our self-in-potential, and that the processes we put in place to improve aren’t meant to help us escape the flawed aspects of ourselves, but rather to chip away and reveal the supreme version of who we already are?
A sculptor doesn’t add to improve, she repeatedly chips away until a beautiful form is revealed.
We’re all sitting on top of gold mines but are too distracted looking out at the horizon of our futures to realize it.
In other words, we’re so captivated by our conscious mind and its efforts to improve onward into the future, that we hardly ever feel the massive glacier of our innate potential ever so slightly shifting under our feet.
It’s a subtle shift in thinking, from bettering yourself to revealing yourself, that might just prompt you to look outside of yourself less often in favor of peering inside for the answers you seek.
