And Who Are You?

E. Rowell:  As a young teenager I asked my stepmom a question to which she replied, “It all depends on what you want out of life.”  I remember feeling a bit dumbstruck.  It hadn’t yet occurred to me that I could choose what I wanted out of life!  That simple, seemingly offhand comment of my stepmom’s made a huge difference in my life:  it was empowering, for which I will always be grateful.

By J. B. Shurk, AMERICAN THINKER    28 April 2024

Image via PickPIk.

Every once in a while, someone expresses to me the feeling that all is lost.  Politics and current events are a daily gut punch, and it is impossible to avoid the cultural revolution exploding just outside our windows.  These are, indeed, troubling times for weary souls.

It is no longer sufficient simply to turn off the television, avoid the Internet, and head out to the closest wilderness trail in search of momentary respite, if not tactical escape.  Because Western Marxism seeks to politicize everything, it is increasingly difficult to find suitable refuge from the abhorrent hordes of “climate change” cultists, pronoun-obsessed wackadoodles, virtue-signaling simps, racial grievance monsters, Hamas enthusiasts, and other angry, “woke” trolls.  While we endure the peak surges of Marxist globalism — a totalitarian system destined to crash from the weight of its own contradictions — it can feel as if we are drowning in unrelenting waves.

Please allow me to offer a lifeline.  I know of no better daily exercise than to spend time (1) repairing and maintaining your relationship with God, (2) helping and protecting the members of your family, (3) testing and strengthening your own character, (4) improving your mind, and (5) healing your physical body.  I have found that if a person works on these goals each day, it is much easier to silence outside noise and find peace.

There are two chief reasons why this is so.  First, these five exercises are not easy, and they are not meant to be.  You could spend every second of every day dedicated to any one and never accomplish the task.  Maintaining a good relationship with God?  Priests and pastors struggle to do so all their lives.  Helping your family?  That responsibility never ends.  Improving your character?  Even honorable people sometimes fail to do what is right.  Becoming a better thinker?  Learning new things requires patience and diligence.  Remaining healthy?  The older a body gets, the more committed a person must become to engage in regular physical activity.  No matter how simple they might seem when reading these words, every one of these five activities requires tremendous energy and time.

The second reason this daily routine will reward you with a sense of peace is that none of these extraordinarily difficult tasks requires you to submit to the madness of the outside world.  Think about the personal responsibilities I have listed: God, family, character, mind, and body.  No matter what level of external chaos afflicts us, we are always in complete control over how we choose to interact with God, how we aid our families, how we weigh what is right and wrong, how we use our brains, and how we direct our bodies to persevere.  No Marxist subversive or government agency can dictate to us how we perform these duties.  They will certainly tell us that they have authority over how we pray, how we live, what we teach, what we know, and how we choose to protect our families.  But what they tell us and what they can make us do are entirely different things.  I would suggest that when untrustworthy people insist on interfering in the way you perform these daily resolutions, you consider their intrusion a test and an opportunity to strengthen your own self-purpose, commitment, and character.  Outside forces cannot diminish us when we use adversity to grow.  After all, as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.

It does not matter how late in life a person learns to take these five daily exercises seriously.  Once they become a part of your routine, you will see the world with more clarity.  What is more, you will soon realize that almost everything you do in life gives you a chance to improve one or more of these personal responsibilities.  When you are confronted with something uncomfortable or demanding, you will begin to ask yourself how the challenge before you might provide the perfect opportunity to enhance your relationship with God, reinforce the foundations of your family, test your character, help you learn, or make you stronger.  Eventually, more and more of the craziness in our world will disappear as the goals you set for yourself lead you down a richer path.

Three of the most difficult questions in life are deceptively simple: (1) Who are you?  (2) What makes you happy?  (3) What do you want out of life?  When people try to answer these questions honestly, most fail.  To be sure, many great philosophers spent lifetimes trying to answer these questions for themselves and also came up short.  It is genuinely perplexing that so many of us know so little about ourselves.  Yet it is equally uplifting to realize that if we spend more time and energy finding those answers, we will be more fulfilled human beings.

I will suggest to you that the surest path toward discovering such important answers lies on the same path that is created when you make these five exercises part of your daily routine.  In this way, turning these goals into personal responsibilities will not only insulate you from the political discord of the outside world but also help you finally understand and appreciate why you are here on this planet at this moment in human history.  Sometimes we are the ones most culpable for hiding our true purpose from ourselves.  Likewise, when we truly know who we are, there is little in this world still to fear.  Relief lies at the far end of self-discovery.

Writer Jonathan Jones recently recounted an interesting story that involved Seattle Seahawks Pro Bowler DK Metcalf and a group of teenagers.  As Metcalf passed the group outside a football stadium, one of the boys taunted him by telling the superstar, “Jalen Ramsey’s your dad.”  Metcalf stopped, looked at the teen, and calmly asked why the kid had insulted him.  After the boy insisted that Ramsey is a much better player than the talented Metcalf who towered over him, the Seahawks wide receiver asked earnestly, “And who are you?”  While the rude fan quietly answered that he plays high school football, the rest of the boys understood Metcalf’s point and teased their friend.  The poised Metcalf looked at the lad again, wished him good luck, and walked away.

I don’t know what Metcalf believes or how he conducts the rest of his personal life, but he handled that situation with boatloads of character.  More than that, he asked the right question — a question that immediately humbled an overconfident teen: “And who are you?”  Only those who have spent the time and energy reflecting on that question can provide a confident answer.  And those who don’t even know themselves have no business telling others who they may or may not be.

Looking around the world today, it is clear that few people actually know who they really are.  The world is awash in generations suffering from identity crises, struggling with addictions, and enduring (often self-imposed) psychological traumas.  Government leaders encourage this madness by exacerbating social conflict at every turn.  Any human society obsessed with pronoun games is a society devoid of true purpose and bereft of honest self-reflection.  In an era of fake news and official propaganda, authority figures do little but distort truth.

For these reasons, any person who can answer those three deceptively simple questions above is light-years ahead of the great majority living with some form of agony today.  And the most effective way of reaching those answers is to take seriously your personal relationships with God and your family and to improve daily your personal character, body, and mind.

Doing so creates a kind of moral armor that allows a person to confront even the worst adversary with a humbling question: And who are you?  Most have no good answer.