Warts, Dread and Doubt

One of the best slices of one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard is the story that Rebecca Parker inserted into her 1998 address to the Unitarian Universalist Association’s General Assembly.  The story was about her surprise in finding how similar she was to a group of distant relatives she hadn't even met.  She ended the story like this:

     Apparently I had never made any choices at all!

     My life was given to me. I did not make myself. And this is how it is.

     We receive who we are before we choose who we will become.

A recent pilgrimage to the land of my ancestors (New Hampshire) laid bare the venn diagram that I am.  I am partly what I was born into; partly what I am now and partly where I am headed, and that no matter where I am from or where I may go, I am part of a community.

It’s living that whole classic interplay between embracing individuality and dodging individualism.  I think I'm OK with loving all three of me, warts, dread and doubt all three.