You are a verb
When you don’t know who you want to be (neither right now nor when you grow up)
Oscar Wilde said that if you know exactly what do you want to be, then you inevitably become it — that is your punishment. But if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing — a writer, an actress — I am a person who does things — I write, I act — and I never know what I am going to do next. That’s human, and just okay.
I think you can get stuck if you think of yourself as a noun. You keep doing things just because you think you’re supposed to. So often we confuse the question of ‘who are you?’ with the question ‘what do you do?’. Have you ever considered that who you really are contains so much more than what are you simply doing in your life right now?
There is a constant change and flow everywhere in nature — glaciers are just rivers that are moving very slowly — so how could there not be a flow in each of us? Or at least in most of us? When we detach and step out of our cosy comfort zone, when we confront something that overwhelms our senses, when we go back to the nature to have our own revelations, we instinctively feel that we carry so much more inside of us. When we allow ourselves, we long for something greater. It’s ancient, and really simple.
