Becoming Yourself

Developing a Better You

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A Humbling Reminder to Be Kind

October 4, 2025 / / 0 Comments

The man was surly.

We’d eaten at the restaurant several times. The food was good and the location convenient, but the server was memorable for his sour mood. He’d waited on us before, and each time he radiated the same “I don’t want to be here” vibe. 

This time, my wife discovered a toothpick in her taquito. Fortunately, it didn’t hurt her, and it had obviously been used during preparation before somehow getting rolled up inside. She decided not to say anything. 

We finished our meal and went to the register to pay. As our server rang us up, his gruff demeanor fell away. “I saw the toothpick on your plate. I’m so sorry that happened. I don’t know how it got there, but it was clean, just used in prep.” 

My wife assured him accidents happen and that it was okay. He replied, “Thank you for being a nice person. Most people aren’t. When something goes wrong, they get mad and write bad reviews and hurt our business even more.”

I asked him if he was the owner, and he nodded glumly. I told him I couldn’t imagine how tough it was to run a restaurant. His reply was startlingly honest: “I want to jump off a building. We never recovered from Covid. The rent is too high. We’re just barely getting by.”

We expressed our sympathy, gave him a nice tip, and said our goodbyes. As we drove away, my wife and I discussed how our perspective of the man had changed now that we knew what he was going through. I was reminded of a quote:

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

plato

When you come across a difficult person, try to withhold judgement. Remember that you don’t know what struggles they’re facing. The young, checked-out cashier might have just gotten rejected for the scholarship that was her only hope for college. The guy who cut you off in traffic may be a single dad racing home from his third job, trying to see his kids before they fall asleep. The older woman distractedly blocking the grocery aisle with her cart may have just buried her husband of fifty-three years. Give the grace you’d hope to receive when you’re not at your best. If you do, you’ll help create a kinder world, and you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself. 

This post was originally published on June 29, 2024.

Hope is an Axe

September 27, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Sometimes four words can stop your heart:

HOPE IS AN AXE.

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

I’m a big fan of hope. I’ve thought about, cultivated, and written about it often (you can read those posts here, here, and here). But I’d never thought of hope in such a forceful way, like a weapon to cut through the morass of doubt, fear, and cynicism that surrounds us. It changes hope from a fragile, ephemeral feeling to a rugged, dependable tool.

That perspective on hope is mirrored in the response author, actor, and musician Nick Cave gave to a fan who presented him with a question I’m sure many of us have asked ourselves:

“Do you still believe in us human beings?”

Nick’s answer paints a sharp-edged view of hope:

Much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent. The truth is, I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line. It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people. It took a devastation to reveal the precariousness of the world, of its very soul, and to understand that the world was crying out for help. It took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope.

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position — it is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.

Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like — such as reading to your little boy, showing him something you love, singing him a song, or putting on his shoes — keeps the devil down in the hole. (Hope) says the world and its inhabitants have value, and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that this is so.

Nick Cave

When you feel torn by the strain of the world, when people around you surrender to their shadow side, when cynicism sings its siren song, set your feet. Reach down deep. Heft the axe of hope. Slam its love-hardened blade into your anger, your despair, your fear. If you do, the sun will blaze through the rend in the darkness, and you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.

This post was originally published August 24, 2024.

The Freedom of Finding Your True Self

September 20, 2025 / / 0 Comments

One of the main reasons I started this blog in 2017 was to map my own journey toward finding my true identity. The real me. My deep self. Who I am apart from the various fleeting hats I wear. Teacher and author Richard Rohr has been an important part of that journey. In his recent Daily Meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation, he spoke so compellingly on that topic that I wanted to share it with you. Regardless of where you fall on the spiritual spectrum, I believe there are meaningful insights here that I hope will help you on your own journey toward Becoming Yourself.

We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot, four quartets

In the Everything Belongs podcast, Father Richard speaks about the spiritual path that winds both away from and toward one’s true home:  

The first going out from home we can say is the creation of the ego. While this is a necessary creating, it is also the creating of a separation. It’s taking myself as central. We probably need to do that, at least until we reach middle age. But then we need to allow what we’ve created to be uncreated. Maybe I was a great basketball player, but that’s gone now. Or maybe I was good-looking, but that’s gone now.  

When we can say “yes” to that uncreation and still be happy, we’ve done our work. My True Self is in God and not in what I’ve created. My self-created self gave me a nice trail to walk on, and something to do each day, but it isn’t really me. It might be my career or my vocation; yet as good as it is, it isn’t my True Self.  

In the metaphor of life as a journey, I think it’s finally about coming back home to where we started. As I approach death, I’m thinking about that a lot, because I think the best way to describe what’s coming next is not “I’m dying,” but “I’m finally going home.” I don’t know what it’s like yet, but in my older age I can really trust that it is home. I don’t know where that trust comes from or even what home is like, but I know I’m not going to someplace new. I’m going to all the places I’ve known deeply. They’re pointing me to the big deep, the Big Real. I do think homecoming is what it’s all about. [1] 

Father Richard continues to reflect upon finding his home in God in this season of his life:  

Well first, I have to say, I don’t fully know how to live there. I’m used to living for 80 years out of building an education, a persona, a reputation, a career. When we’ve worked at those things for so long, on a very real level we don’t know how to live without them. But thank God, they’re taken away from us. God slows us down, I think necessarily, or we won’t fall into the True Self.  

My understanding of the second half of life is mostly homesickness for the True Self. I want to learn to be who God really created me to be. And I think all God wants me to be is who I really am. [2]  

This post was originally published on May 11, 2024. As shared in the May 6, 2024 Daily Meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation (cac.org) [1] Adapted from Mike Petrow, Paul Swanson, and Richard Rohr, “Tips for the Road,” Everything Belongs, season introduction, ep. 5 (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2023), podcast. Available as MP3 audio and PDF transcript.  [2] Adapted from Mike Petrow, Paul Swanson, and Richard Rohr, “The Two Halves of Life with Brené Brown,” Everything Belongs, season 1, ep. 1 (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2024), podcast. Available as MP3 audio and PDF transcript.

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