Anam Cara

THIS IS ONE OF THE SACRED DUTIES OF IMAGINATION: HONOURABLY to imagine your self. The shortest distance in the world is the one between you and yourself. The space in question is tiny. Yet what goes on in this little space determines nearly everything about the kind of person you are and about the kind of life you are living. Normally, the priority in our culture is to function and do what is expected of us. So many people feel deep dissatisfaction and an acute longing for a more real life, a life that allows their souls to come to expression and to awaken; a life where they could discover a different resonance, one which echoes their heartfelt dreams and longing. For their short while on earth, most people long to have the fullest life they can. No-one wants to remain a prisoner in an unlived life. This was the intention of Jesus: ‘I have come that you may have life and have it to the full.’ Of the many callings in the world, the invitation to the adventure of an awakened and full life is the most exhilarating. This is the dream of every heart. Yet most of us are lost or caught in forms of life that exile us from the life we dream of. Most people long to step onto the path of creative change that would awaken their lives to beauty and passion, deepen their contentment and allow their lives to make a difference.

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This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

THE WORLD NEVER COMES AT YOU ALL AT ONCE. SOME experiences barely register; others strike you. In the midst of everything, there is one experience that you cannot escape. This is an experience you are having literally every moment, namely, that this is you, in this body, here in the world, now. If someone were to ask you which fact you could not doubt, you would declare this to be the clearest and most intimate fact you know. Yet the strange thing is that the nature and meaning of this fact is neither clear nor obvious. In other words, whoever you consider yourself to be is also the result of your own imagination. You are not simply here. Neither are you definitively and forever ‘you’. You develop and change constantly; each new experience adds to you and alters your shape and image. You imagine who you are. Of all imaginative work this is the most intimate and creative. It is also a powerful and yet vulnerable position to be in regarding yourself. It seems that there is a stranger who has somehow stolen into your life, one who knows all your intimate feelings and thoughts and has gained control of how you understand your life and see yourself. By now this stranger has gained power over you. Your every thought is vulnerable to the stranger’s outlook and consideration. It is an unbelievable way to live: to be tied for ever in this caged inner conversation. The irony is of course: the stranger is you.

No person is a finished thing, regardless of how frozen or paralysed their self-image might be. Each one of us is in a state of perennial formation. Carried within the flow of time, you are coming to be who you are in every new emerging moment. Life is a journey that fills out your identity and yet the true nature of a journey remains largely invisible. Inside each journey a secret harvesting is at work. It is as though the beginning of a journey offers the pilgrim a mirror where something is glimpsed, something that is beginning to form as an image. Over the course of the journey the image fills and fills until finally at the end of the journey the empty mirror has become a living icon of spirit. When the new baby arrives there is barely a blur in the mirror, then at the end of its life when the person lies down to die, the mirror has filled, the image has taken on the depth of a great icon. Now there is a reversal and transfiguration. As the spirit departs it looks into the deathbed and sees barely a blur because it has filled with the invisible harvest of life’s experiences, transfigurations and memories, its inner narrative.

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