What a long time it takes to become the person one has always been! -- Parker Palmer

I am in the Black Hills of South Dakota right now at my parents’ house.  My mother has Alzheimer’s and my father cares for her at home. I have come to spend some time with the both of them while my mother can still remember who I am. It is not an easy visit but it isn’t torturous either….just uncomfortable.  There is not much I can actually do to help them….it is mostly just a matter of being present. They have their routine. I can help with the dishes and cook my father balanced meals but beyond that I am just hanging out with them.          We don’t really learn how to just be in our society…we learn that we’re supposed to always be doing…..but there is nothing to do here except just be who I am.

I will also be attending my high school reunion while I am here. Some of my friends from school will make the trek, including my sister. It is a reunion made up of many years, not just mine.  Most of the friends I hung out with in high school will not be here, though.....and a couple of my close friends have already died after valiant fights with cancer.         36 years ago as we were getting ready to graduate I was given the honor of being named the female ‘Most Likely to Succeed’ from the Douglas High School class of ’75. Most Likely to Succeed….what exactly did that mean?  Have I succeeded yet?  How exactly am I supposed to measure that and know when I have arrived?

In his book, Let Your Life Speak, master teacher Parker Palmer says that as we grow up “we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own….. Discovering our true self is not a goal to be achieved but a gift to be received….it does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond our reach but accepting the treasure of true self we already possess…..being who we are called to be does not come from a voice "out there" calling us to become something we are not.”        I have come to see this journey as living into who we already are. We don’t discover our true self by constantly “shoulding” on ourselves. We discover who we really are by listening to what our life is trying to tell us about ourselves and by claiming the gifts we have had all along.  Theologian Frederick Buechner puts it this way: your unique place in the world is "the place where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need." 

Maybe the better question for me is not - how am I supposed to measure success and know when I have arrived?  Maybe the better question is:  What is it that my classmates saw in me 36 years ago that lead them to see me as a success?  Am I living out of my true self and using the gifts that I have always had to make the most of the person that I am?  What am I called to do today?  Maybe it is to just live as a human being instead of a human doing.