Who Are You?

If you lived in ancient Greece and had a burning need to know about your future fate, you would take a journey to the oracles at Delphi. Besides the likely difficult travel, this would often require fasting, ritual, and material offerings prior to entering into the temple to receive your prophecy. Visiting the oracles, unlike reading your daily horoscope, was a major commitment.

On the way to receive your prophecy, you would walk by an inscription on the temple which stated simply “Know thyself”. At which point, you might think, “wait a minute, do I even know myself? What does that even mean? Maybe I’m not ready to hear what this temple virgin has to say after all.” You start dragging your feet on the marble stairs, but the ushers whisk you along. You are trying to put it all together in your head before you get into the sacred chamber, running through your mind to figure out who you really are.

But by then, you would be in the temple, receiving often unintelligible yet poetically structured information about your fate. The words still ringing in your ears, you would have to exit the temple stage left as the next seeker came, looking to understand their fate.

Though this system did crank out a few bangers as far as prophecies are concerned, it is hardly a consistent means of determining one’s path forward. Not to mention its completely inefficient.

But before we go throwing out the mystery with the history, I think it’s fair to state that the temple inscription to “know thyself” was probably worth the whole journey there and back. And, in the absence of a modern oracular tradition, I’m beginning to think it’s one of the most important ideas a person can meditate on.

Looking back at my 80’s/90’s childhood, the closest thing I had to an oracle was the perpetual din of the Disney channel, and the various heroines singing songs about the deepest longings of their hearts. Usually these movies, like a household favorite, The Little Mermaid, ended with the main character’s realization that she should embrace who she is. That in order to get the prince and the happily ever after, she somehow needed to “know thyself”.

I guess, for a modern-day capitalist version of a Disney princess movie, I grew up and married the prince, then achieved FIRE, which I equated to happily ever after. Surprisingly, I did most of this while completely ignoring the directive to know myself.

Which is wild, because the FIRE movement leans heavily on Stoic philosophy. Why does that matter?

Because the Stoics were really into the whole “know thyself” thing.

So, despite Ariel’s magical self-discovery and FIRE’s interest in Stoic belief, I still managed to get this far in life without truly recognizing my own nature. How did that happen?

I thought you’d never ask.

In my case, I was raised to believe human nature…meaning my nature, was inherently bad. To the extent that anyone knew themselves (in the context of my religious background), it was mostly for the purpose of asking forgiveness for their inherently sinful nature. The self was not a worthy subject of contemplation. There was also the idea that doing good things made a person somehow more worthy of the grace of God or a higher power.

Whether or not these things are actually the message of the religion I grew up in doesn’t matter. This is the message I heard. The self was to be somehow sublimated in service to a higher power.

So, away I went. I did the things that I thought were good. I got on the path towards being a good person. Good grades, good schools, good jobs, good salary. When that seemed off, I readjusted my sites, but this time on getting rid of debt, good savings rate, good investment strategy, good exit plan. I never had to know myself when I was following a known path.

And then I retired.

Into the unknown. In fact, there was no path. There were suddenly an infinite number of paths. And in order to begin to understand where I was going, I realized I had to trust that moving into the unknown would be OK.

But I was somehow gripped by fear. The same anxiety I had (when I was in school and when working) was still there. And the only thing left to do was begin to get curious about what was really going on. If I still felt this way, maybe I needed to find out why.

For me, the only thing that began to move the needle was meditation. I know, I know, you can’t meditate. That’s fine. But for the record, nobody can meditate.

Until they can. And that’s the whole point in the beginning.

Meditation means “to become familiar with” and hot damn, that is exactly what it is about. I started to realize all of the things I was thinking about. The act of sitting, silent, focused on the nothingness of space challenged me to sit with all kinds of feelings. The more I could sit with these feelings, the less power they had over me. The more I sat in meditation, the more I realized that there wasn’t just one me, there were two: the essential me and the idea I had of who I was (more accurately, who I was told I was).

Know thyself was a directive to contemplate, with regularity, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. As far as I can tell, it is an ongoing and forever process. Which may sound daunting, but it beats the alternative. As an added bonus, my anxiety mostly dissipated, and life began unfolding more easily. Sure, I don’t always want to meditate, but I’m always happy I did.

A few years ago, the Disney hit Frozen came out. If you haven’t seen it, there are two princesses: one who has freakish powers and one who is on the classic princess career trajectory (aka meet a prince). The princess with powers is told to bury them, to deny her essential nature, which she does until it backfires. She is cast out of society for being a freak, at which point she decides to embrace those parts of herself. If you haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil the ending for you, but the whole thing is really about loving who you are-being yourself and loving yourself. There is even a song in this movie about going into the unknown. And another song about being free by letting go. Maybe you’ve heard it.

I had been trying to be someone who was worthy of love by being a certain way and achieving certain things. Figuring out how to love myself being myself was totally different. It was the unknown. Nobody could tell me how to get there. There was no playbook. Even if I had an unhinged Pythian sybil recite my fortune in hexameter, I would still have to know who I was to use the information.

The point is, wherever you are in your life, knowing yourself is essential. It’s groundwork for everything you want to achieve. Sure, you can work off of the known playbook, but you might end up veering off course of who you actually are. And that is a miserable, anxiety inducing existence. Ask me how I know.

So who do you think you are?