We are not lost. We are never lost. In writing this section, I began to wonder about the possibility that the search for the becoming self could imply to some that any of us exists in a lost state because they aren't searching or don't feel that search goes well. We are never lost. As I think back to my suicidal impulse and many years of desperate struggles with depression and nearly endless negative ideation, I see that I was never lost no matter how I chose to feel or to think about myself and life. My path and destination toward the becoming self lived within me always, and every time I reached for it, there it was. The process often came very hard and very painfully, but it came. So long as I continued to aspire to something slightly beyond my limits of belief, I continued on my journey. I was not lost. I write that for the first time. I think that for the first time. I feel that for the first time. Even when I had no real sense of direction or purpose or meaning, direction, purpose and meaning always existed. The spiritual poem and song Amazing Grace sounds that very idea: "I once was lost, but now am found." As a spiritual, it does so in a formally religious context, but we can read it in a more secular context as well.
This hero's journey takes the speaker through much pain and sorrow all of which becomes transformed by "grace." The nature of this grace in the poem stems from a direct intervention of the divine. Suffering takes on beauty and liberation even as we can see our suffering as meaningful and direction filled. The speaker of the poem never moves a step physically. She doesn't travel to distant realms to achieve her becoming found. She finds it within herself. She sees that as finding the divine within herself. We can also see it as finding the essential power of the becoming self within us. No matter how long it takes and what terrifyingly bad choices we have made or will make, our becoming self remains healthy and whole. In that sense, we remain also healthy and whole because no matter how distracted life has made us in one sense, we are our becoming self, our defiant human spirit, our whole being always. No matter how much material identity we build and ego we invest in that material identity, the having and necrophily mode of living, our self, our being, our destination always lives within us. That's how we survive the un-survivable and recover from the unrecoverable. The self within always embodies the truth of our essential value as a whole being, and that whole being can attain some measure of that wholeness consciously and live with it as the core of everyday life. In that way, everyday life stops feeling quite so everyday. The everyday becomes the unique, and the "Yes" we speak to life becomes more and more natural. The wonder in every moment we live, the wonder in every encounter in the I/Thou fashion we create, brings a joyful momentum to our living with ourselves and in our living with all the others in our shared world.
We are not lost because our human nature offers us incredible levels of resiliency of all kinds. When we find within us that which does not fear, as does the speaker of the Amazing Grace poem, we find that our resiliency in our sense of self in community offers far more of what we want from life than the dominator mode of living expressed through conformity. Although I would not have believed it for many, many years of denying myself unconditional positive regard, we can find a connection to the becoming self, so we feel we are becoming and have been part of that becoming all our lives even when we were unaware of that connection. When we feel lost, we feel fear, the fear of the unknown. When we fear the unknown, as we discussed earlier, we do not fear the unknown, we fear what we put into the unknown. We make the unknown the personification of what we fear in ourselves, our essential inadequacy and inability to deal with what may happen to us. It’s the child's boogeyman. The less we offer ourselves unconditional positive regard, the more we fear.
I spent many, many years of my life endlessly afraid and endlessly sick and miserable because of it. I felt lost then, and until I chose to leave suicide behind as the answer to my fears, I stayed lost. In wanting death, I denied my resiliency because I did not believe in myself or my life as worthy of living. It hurts deeply to feel alive and unworthy of life itself. That really feels like the end and depth of lost.
But now I am found.