Life is complicated. What I’ve always wanted life to be is… simple? Simpler, anyway.
I’m not talking about the kind of simplicity that comes from giving away half the furniture and painting the walls white, or sitting around on an empty beach all day, though that doesn’t sound so bad.
I just mean I’ve always wanted to feel like I had it all together, like I was qualified to be a person. But no. Life has always been complicated, and most of the time I was pretty sure I was doing it wrong.
In fact, I had a charming personal mantra that went like this: I am the worst.
It was like an affirmation, except the opposite. As far as I could tell, everyone else was pretty much okay and I was kind of a mess, so everyone else was better and I was the worst. This was basically a mathematical law. Or at least logic.
But what if we are the way we are for a damn good reason?
What if the goal around here is to accept the truth of who you are—the truth that you are a messy, confused, flailing expression of love in the world? Maybe the simplest, truest version of ourselves is that one. Maybe the real work of our lives is to strip away the extra stuff we’ve added on top, so we can know who we really are.
Maybe the work is to stop seeing our true selves as problems to be fixed.
Maybe love—the love that animates us, the love that is as close as our breath, the love that is in us and through us, the love that we might call God—keeps offering us invitations to peel back those layers, to see ourselves more clearly, everywhere and all the time.
Ready to accept that invitation? Pick up a copy of my new book, Permission Granted, and keep reading.
Permission Granted is about giving yourself permission to be who you really are, and it’s available now everywhere books are sold.
