The ideal self

[qatarperegrine]

This afternoon, upon returning to my office after a meeting, I discovered that a friend had left the following on the whiteboard wall behind my desk. (He later told me that he had had to walk out of microeconomics to come write it down, lest it be overwhelmed by Ricardian equivalence.)

Epiphany (3/15): The real self is a diminished version of the ideal self.

I laughed and called my friend a neo-platonist. And then it occurred to me that my epiphany of the year could well be summed up as the reverse. The self that I have held as ideal is a truncated version of who I really am; it's the subset of my identity that I have deemed worthy or "good enough."

Good enough for what, I'm not sure.

Comments

"you do not have to be good..."

[http://users.livejournal.com/syd___/]

i have been thinking about this post for the past couple days, and woke up composing a response/reflection. this happens often with your thoughtful posts, but i usually am ready to respond so long after your post that i feel silly about doing so, and instead try to generate conversations with people about the topic in face to face conversation -- i generated a strange conversation about hell during knitting circle the other day.

and the rest of this comment just started getting so long, i turned it into a post.
http://users.livejournal.com/syd___/2007/03/17/

thank you for encouraging my thinking. it's one of the things i truly value about our friendship -- even when your questions and reflections aren't at all directed towards me, i feel encouraged to thoughtfullness.

Re: "you do not have to be good..."

[qatar.livejournal.com]

Thank you, syd. That made my day. :-)

I read this, and your post, last night before I went to bed, and I woke up with the first two lines of this Rumi poem floating around my head:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.