Ever noticed how hard most people try to express their uniqueness? And how everybody takes the same well-worn paths of expression?
You get your nose pierced, or your tongue. You get a tat—a highly original one of course—of a butterfly or a Gatling Gun. (Now that would be different!) You dye your hair orange or pink or blue. Or shave it off altogether.
We pick various statements of independence at various ages. Back in my college days of yore my statement was hitchhiking.
Smoking pot didn’t separate me from the crowd. Nor did my ripped bellbottom jeans dragging in the dirt. Not sleeping with the few guys I dated was kind of different—but nothing I’d admit to my obviously more liberated peers on the pill. But hitchhiking?
It was radical. Dangerous. The very thing my parents would have heart failure over and kill me for at the same time. All the better was the fact that, unlike most of my fellow students, I had a car! A nice new one my parents had bought for me. Turning my back on it and resorting to my thumb was …
Really really stupid.
But I felt so free! So brave! Bold! Adventurous! I loved hitching. It was the backwaters of Virginia in the 1970s for Pete’s sake. How dangerous could that be? Fortunately I never found out. My last ride was a state policeman who picked me up and chewed me out for the entire trip back to my dorm—threatening to arrest me and call my parents if he ever caught me out on the road again.
Damn! But I found other ways of asserting my uniqueness. Sometimes I did shit to make a statement—to myself if no one else. But mostly I just went with the flow. But here’s the thing—the whole time I never saw myself as genuinely unique because if I’d grasped my absolute precious one-of-a-kindness I wouldn’t have been trying so hard to express it.
I wouldn’t have struggled against life so much. Or tried to stand out as much. I would have just quietly reveled in the fact of my own being. I would have lived every day rejoicing at being alive and capable of doing whatever I was doing. Even breathing is enough when you know you are already one-of-a kind! An expression of life through a once-in-forever genetic vehicle that will never come again in all of Eternity.
Wow!
Whether it was hitching or riding my own motorcycle (something else women didn’t do back then) or working in television (again no women) or whatever else, I was always expressing my own unique spirit. But I didn’t know it. And the reason I didn’t know it was because I didn’t identify with my spirit. I identified with my personality—how boisterous could I be? How brash and brave? How loud and opinionated? How special?
I identified with my body. How slender, how sexy, how blonde could I be? I identified with my material possessions. How much money could I make? How big a house could I have? How fancy a car?
When I turned 30 and got on the spiritual path the question became “How spiritual can I be?”
Me me me. I I I. Cate Montana – how amazing can I make my self?
And all the while my beautiful spirit took the back seat. Ignored. Unseen. Unsung … totally amazing, running the whole show, giving me life and the opportunity to hitch my personality onto its brilliance and worship that instead of the light I already was.
My my my. Thank God for living long enough to finally see the light!