Parents send kids off to college. CEOs retire. Champions hand trophies to winners of the next round. Actors play their role’s final scene.
When your day is done, do you remember that you’ve ended the arc of a character in a play, but that it’s not the end for you?
It’s so obvious that we aren’t our roles, and yet how we grip onto them anyway.
“I’m holding onto dear life,” one might say, or, “The two most dangerous days of your life are the day you are born and the day you retire.” Really? Does retiring need to be so dangerous? Apparently so, at at least for some.
If I could chose one lesson in a philosophy about how to live, it might be to start by encouraging us all to see endings and beginnings as sacred rewards.
Your reward for finishing the role of a lifetime — as parent, as teacher, as businessperson, as fill-in-the-blank — is to receive the unhurried breathe of those who know their true nature. To receive the lightness of being when one of your masks falls away.
Whether you remove the mask gracefully or resist until it’s torn off is entirely up to you.
Either way, that nature unmasked is one of play and change, not cement and stagnation.
As Toni Morrison said, “Definitions are for the definers, not the defined.”
What will you define yourself as next?
With an attitude of freedom toward our own definitions we might become a society of players, joyfully contemplating the masks of our identity, rather than clinging to the end of things with all the fear that we bring to the end of life itself.
So don’t take yourself so seriously.
After all, who you think you are is probably just another role and one that you are bound to outgrow anyway.
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