#1 — Jan 4, 2024
Yesterday I started listening to Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. It’s a cozy, poetic little book filled with insight, and its age (it was written in 1955) makes it all the more startling how relevant it is nowadays. She speaks of the need to find balance between external demands (what she calls “multiplicity”) and simplicity. I especially liked this quote:
The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.
I want to be sincere in my writing for Innerhelm—to shed my mask. That’s part of what I want to achieve with its newsletter specifically: it is a place where my thoughts can be more raw, more contextualized, and more like musings than declarations. But I also hope to achieve that mask-shedding in the longer-form blog posts I will write, specifically by resisting the urge to make them “clickbaity,” write them as “listicles,” or frame them as “tips” or “hacks.”
However, I don’t think this idea of sincerity, when applied personally, means we should resist all uncomfortable social expectations. I think conforming to those that are aligned with your potential can be a good thing. I also don’t think “sincerity” means being “true to yourself.” Society often uses that phrase to promote an inevitable self, or a self that is inherent and unchanging, tyrannically overriding our efforts to change. But that kind of “just the way I am” thinking is, to me, a textbook example of learned helplessness, which is the polar opposite of agency thinking.
Rather, I think living with sincerity means validating the external expectations imposed upon us by measuring them against who we aspire to become, and resisting the urge to resort to bad faith as an excuse for or an escape from our not having fully achieved that becoming. We need patience and compassion for ourselves, certainly, but this should not include a surrender to “the way we are” or our “nature.” There is a quote by psychologist Carl Rogers that hints at this distinction:
The curious truth is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
Society’s “just the way I am” philosophy of self-acceptance often overlooks the important implication of the last part of this quote: the goal is still change. We must be accepting of and patient with ourselves, but at the same time must not surrender to the status quo. We have to be willing to live with “the tension of betweenness,” as Ross Ellenhorn puts it in How We Change (p. 47). To do so, according to Ellenhorn, we need hope, the purpose of which “is to deliver you from the here of wanting [or not being] and the targeted someday of getting [or becoming].” He continues:
Hope holds you together while you struggle with feeling that you lack something important—something you need. And it keeps you going, even when you don’t get this need met immediately.
Interestingly, as I write this, I am myself relying on hope. I hope that these thoughts are useful to you as a reader. More broadly, I hope that Innerhelm will achieve its goal of uncovering answers for how agency thinking can be cultivated.
Furthermore, all of this fits nicely into the societal ritual of New Years’ resolutions, which many people are participating in this month. I’m planning to write a longer form post about this in the next week or so, but for now I’ll leave you with two questions to consider as you form goals for this year (if that’s your thing):
Best,
Tyler Mercer ⛵