What is authenticity?
Is it a coat I put on daily?
Does it change with me
As I do?
Or does it live eternally stuck in some sort of stagnant non reality
That lives in other peoples heads
A projection that beams out of them
Onto something that I said
Perhaps
Two months ago
Or ten years.
Madness.
Who we are
Transforms with growth
Therefore I guess
The coat transforms too
Otherwise
How can it be authentic?
We have to be mutable
Flexible
Open to flow
Otherwise the life we are supposed to grow into
Moves passed us
Without us in it
If the only constant is change
Then we must go with it
Get in the cab, take the ride
Otherwise
We miss our life,
whilst trying to conform
to some idea.
But whose idea?
Not mine.
I want to choose
what is choosing me
I have to become the person
that would choose it.
Life
Me
*It’s so easy to get stuck in ways of being that are comfortable and familiar. Both to ourselves and others. Great leaps of transformation are unnerving. Which is why mostly, we snap back into our “normal” behaviour and patterns quite quickly. I believe I read somewhere it is a stretch for our brains that can last as little as two seconds.
How very sad that we live a human life with so much potential for change, so much opportunity to transform, yet the increments are so small as to be hardly measurable at all.
But knowing about the two seconds. Is power. Because two seconds isn’t very long to be uncomfortable.
And if each time, you don’t fall quite back to where you were before, if you can change consistently, every day, in small habits, routines, consistent effort. Eventually transformation happens and it feels and looks natural.
As if it was there all along. Which it was. Part of a pattern, that steps away from the wall, and begins walking on its own
The header photo was one I took out running – this part of the creek is tidal, every day it fills and releases. I caught it at the right time – it looked like a path to the ocean. The patterns of the sky reflects in still water, and only still water.
This is so great, Kate! Uncanny how it’s exactly what I feel I needed to hear this morning. I love this: “I want to choose/what is choosing me.” This feels like the heart of it to me. I appreciate your acknowledgement that discomfort of some kind is a normal feature of transformation, but that on the other side of that, what once seemed daunting becomes the norm, the new jumping-off point.
The perfect reflection of the sky in the tidal creek is stunning!
Thankyou Camilla, it was a stunning morning. The inlet is always changing, sometimes broad and rushing and at others a small thin strip of water. The reflections are lovely.
Kate! Your photo is stunning! Your poems offer an exploration and discovery of life’s deeper questions. A rich reading experience. Thank you.
Hi Michelle, glad it resonated, I write and share what is occurring for me – it’s nice when it lands with someone else as well. 😊
you’re only authentic when you’re true to yourself. People can spot phoniness. That’s one of the main concerns of ‘Catcher in the Rye’; it is not hard to be authentic; it is very hard to be inauthentic. You can change and still be authentic. Your core remains the same. Good post, Kate ; provokes thought —
I think there is a small foggy area in the becoming, not for the individual but for the observer who has always been used to a person being a certain way, and then everything lines up again John. And yes, I agree, fake can be spotted two miles away – at least.