On my desk, I have a small stack of newspaper clippings that I’ve kept for some sort of inspirational purpose. One article, from The New York Times in 2022 is about Ben Crowe, a mind-set coach who works with tennis players.

I have several items noted in the article, including that one of his core principles is that “We don’t know ourselves enough, and the bits we do know we don’t love enough.”

How true.

While I always have been a reflective sort of person, for some reason, recent years have me reflecting more. I don’t know if it’s age or the pandemic or the after effect of so many losses in my life, that I want to make sure I take advantage of everything I can in this life that we have. A life that feels as if it’s spinning faster all the time.

It’s amazing how disconnected people are from themselves. But it’s also a challenge to get to know ourselves. It means reaching keeping inside, a place many people don’t feel comfortable going. It might be that as we tried to reach deep inside earlier in our lives, other people squashed us. We learned early that if we wanted to be who thought we should be, we’d have to dodge the darts of people who were jealous and/or didn’t want to see us succeed. That meant we made a choice– either to keep fighting or to shut down.

Yet, if we do know ourselves, this also might have happened- people shot us down there, too, so we learned that maybe we shouldn’t love those aspects of ourselves that we had come to really like.

And so we found ourselves in a circle, one that didn’t leave us happy, but left us believing we needed to be okay with where we were.

Life is short and we all have choices. I know the digging inside oneself is difficult, and often lonely, but I also know the journey is well worth taking. I wouldn’t be where I am or have done everything i have if I’d chosen to shut down. Embrace and love who you are what you contribute to this world.