Being You.

You.

There is no one else in the whole world just like you.  You have the unique and unrepeatable privilege of being you. You don’t have to do anything to enjoy this privilege. It is free—a gift! And yet being you is also a dilemma. Everything you do determines who this ‘you’ that you are will be. Will you be whoever you just happen to become? Or will you author this first and only edition of yourself? Will you be you by accident or on purpose?

We—that is, those of us who are not ‘you’—share in this privilege. We share in the privilege of you being you. You are always ‘you’ with us. With some of us, anyway. In fact, that adds to the privilege: those of us with you join an elite who have the privilege of experiencing, knowing, interacting with the unique and unrepeatable you. This privilege is irreplaceable, and because it is irreplaceable, it is precious.

But it also heightens your dilemma. Because everything you do determines who you will be, you are responsible for who it is we are with. You are deciding what it will be like to be with you. Will you be trustworthy or will you be irresponsible? Will you be thoughtful or foolish? Interested or indifferent? Attentive or obtuse? Present or absent? Only you can choose which to be and your choices will determine not only who you are, but who we are with.

This choice is yours and only you can make it. Others can only invite you to be the ‘you’ they hope to be with. You may accept this invitation or reject it. It is up to you.

In any case, here are some ways of being ‘you’ with the rest of us that I hope you will consider:

Be Present

We can only be with you to the extent that you are with us. There are different ways of being present, however, and so also different ways of being absent. You can be present the way a coffee mug is present on my desk. You can be present, in other words, by the mere sharing of a time and place. When a teacher takes roll, this is the bare-bones kind of ‘present’ measured. But you can also be present the way that I, looking at the mug on my desk, am present. You can be awake instead of asleep. You can be seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling. You may, in brief, be present ‘consciously’.

As strange as it may sound, in neither of these ways of being present are you yet really, truly present. You become really, truly present to us when you are present to yourself. When you give attention to what you see, hear, smell, taste, and feel, when you notice the questions that arise about these experiences and the ideas that emerge to answer them, when you wonder whether those ideas are any good, and when you deliberate about what, if anything, these experiences, these questions, these ideas suggest it might be worth doing, when you wonder what kind of ‘you’ they invite you to be—or whether any of that even matters—when present in these ways, as present to yourself, then you are truly present to the rest of us.

Because I value the privilege of being with you, I invite you to be present and present above all in this third, most complete way. But that will require that you be present in the other two ways as well. It demands a certain disposition of your body in time and space. It requires you direct your consciousness to certain things and not others. I am aware that each of these requirements comes with its own challenges. I will come back to that.

Be Attentive

Attention is selective. Some things impose themselves on your attention: a sudden noise, a rapid movement, the scald of heat, the prick of pain, the dragging anchor of boredom, the jangle of anxiety, etc. Still, you can take hold of your attention and direct it. Here again you are free to be you in the way you see fit, deciding where to give your attention, whether to the text, to the melody, to the smell of the tea, the warmth of gratitude, and so on.

Whether imposed from without or directed from within, attention is also focal. It selects from a field of options what to put front and center. However, the focus of your attention does not cut out entirely what has not been selected. It moves it to the background. To the extent something falls into the background, you pay no particular attention. Put another way, what is in the background is present to you, but you are not present to it. Nonetheless, this background stays close to the center of attention, so that if attention wanders, if it is pulled or directed somewhere else, the new object of attention will be drawn from the background. Occasionally you might get so engrossed by a narrow, intense focus that it takes rather a lot to draw your attention anywhere else. It can seem like the background has dropped away entirely—though it certainly has not. Sometimes a wash of indifference can fall over your attention. You ‘space out.’ You are not ‘there,’ which is to say that even though you remain conscious, you are not really present. Something has to ‘bring you back.’ You were awake, but you were not paying attention.

All of your experiencing includes an experience of being you. Only you get to have this experience, and so it is part of the unique, unrepeatable, precious privilege of being you. Even your experience of being ‘spaced out’ is your experience and it cannot be anyone else’s. You do not have to pay attention to the experience of being you, but no one else gets the chance. Even more than that, you can decide as well whether to be attentive to the you that ‘you’ just happen to be, or to a ‘you’ that you have decided to be on purpose. In fact, if you decide to pay attention to the experience of being you, you will have decided to be you in a way that is attentive instead of ‘spaced out,’ or distracted.

Being you in a way that is attentive, then, involves two choices: 1) choosing to direct your attention and 2) choosing what to direct your attention to. I know that both of these involve a pile of challenges, ranging from pre-existing neurological differences to industries engineering technologies of distraction to deep questions about what merits attention or whether what we pay attention to matters at all. I promise to return to these as well. For now, because I would very much like you to be really and truly with us, I invite you to be attentive.

Be Inquisitive

If your attention includes being present to yourself as well as to your world, I promise that you will notice questions welling up. You will find some of the things you are paying attention to puzzling, others fascinating, and yet others challenging to your previously held beliefs and assumptions. Sometimes the process will run the other way: you will find your attention landing again and again on those things you want to understand, to know more about, to get to the bottom of, and so on. I am confident that this will happen because I am confident that, in a basic and important sense, you are intelligent. Moreover, you are spontaneously intelligent. Whether you pay attention to them or not, questions occur to you. You do not have to do anything for it to happen. Like being ‘you’, being intelligent will happen whether you do anything about it or not.

You face another choice then. Will you ignore, wave away, or suppress the tug of these questions? Will you judge in advance that their answers are not worth knowing? Or will you attune yourself to them, ratify them, give voice to them? Will you hold these questions that express your intelligence out in front of you and follow them where they lead? Will you be a ‘you’ who not only asks questions, but also works to answer them?

These questions, because they are occasioned by your experiencing, are likewise yours. Only you can acknowledge them, can articulate their substance, can follow their call to deeper understanding. No one can make you and no one can do it for you. And while people who have similar experiences come upon similar questions, still your questions are unique and unrepeatable. They are unique in their relationship to your experiences, unique in the poetic ways in which you choose to give their nagging tug a voice in language, unique in how you come to answer them, and unique in their daisy-chain accumulation and progression from one to the next. If you allow yourself what is sometimes called a “life of the mind,” that life is as unique, unrepeatable, and precious as the rest of you.  

And like the rest of you, if you choose to neglect the life of your mind, that has consequences for the rest of us. Questions you do not ask may go unasked altogether. The ideas that would answer your unique, irreplaceable, and precious questions may remain unconsidered. We will not even know we have been deprived of them.

Therefore, I invite you to be inquisitive. The world we live in and the world that lives in us are both immense, complex, ever-changing, and fascinating. If you want the freedom to decide who ‘you’ will be for yourself and with us, you will need to understand both worlds as well as you can. And the only way to get answers about either world is to ask. The questions will come to you; you have to decide to pick them up. I hope you will, because your questions and your ideas may be the ones we desperately need.

Be Reasonable

Because you are intelligent, ideas will come to you just as spontaneously as questions will. You face the same dilemma about the ideas that answer your questions as the questions themselves. Will you ignore them, wave them away, suppress them? Will you mute them with entertainment or intoxication? Will you flee from them into frenetic business? Or will you take them up, consider them, refine, clarify, and revise them? Will you, in short, be a ‘you’ that is thoughtful or a ‘you’ that is thoughtless?

If you resolve to live a ‘life of the mind’—which is, again, to be ‘you’ in a way that takes questions and ideas seriously—you will immediately face a further dilemma, for ideas are not all of equal quality. There is, of course, the major difference between ideas that are true and ideas that are false. Genuine questions articulate a desire for not just any answer, but a correct answer, and so only the truth will do. Not that this stops us from coming up with all sorts of ingenious ways to settle for—or even prefer—lies, bullshit, and other kinds of falsehood.

But even among true ideas, there is a spectrum of quality and so your dilemma persists. Some ideas are just barely true. Others are true, but in a limited way that may or may not be obvious. Yet other ideas are true, but vague or fuzzy. We know they mean something and even something true, but what exactly that is? We cannot quite say. Or we may be convinced something is true, but not sure precisely why it is true. Such ideas call out for precise definitions, for the marshalling of evidence, and for the deployment of reasons. Consequently, a decision in favor of true ideas is only the beginning of a long journey on the path to a more reasonable way of being ‘you’. A ‘you’ that can discern what is true, but also discern why it is true, and say so.

When you know that what you think is true, and when you know why it is true, and when you can say so, then you know that you are dealing—on that particular point anyway—with reality on reality’s terms. When you know the truth in this fulsome way, what you have is at once really and truly yours (no one can know it for you), but also you have what is ‘so,’ what is ‘the case’, what is objective. And when you can communicate what you know to be true and why it is true effectively, you are relieved of one loneliness that might come with being you: the loneliness of being a world entirely of your own. When we understand one another and understand why our mutual understanding is correct, and when we can say so to one another in a meaningful way, then we have more to share with one another than our uniqueness. Then we co-inhabit a little corner of the universe. Then we are not just present to one another but present together among the real. Then we step beyond ourselves, though always as ourselves.

Thus, I invite you, for yourself and with us, to be reasonable. Strive with us to live in reality on reality’s terms.

Be Responsible

This, in a way, is what we have been talking about this whole time: the privilege of being the unique and unrepeatable ‘you’, along with the dilemmas it imposes. I have invited you to a series of choices above: to be present, to be attentive, to be inquisitive, to be reasonable. But all I can do is invite you. I can, I suppose, also cajole you. Incentivize you. But in the end, if you do not want to be present, attentive, inquisitive, or reasonable, nothing I can do can make you.

But there’s a deeper element at play here. If you choose (even by ostensibly not-choosing) to be absent, obtuse, incurious, and irrational, you are choosing to be irresponsible. You are electing not to take up, not to take in-hand the unique and irreplaceable ‘you’ that you are so fortunate to be. You are electing not to show up, not to join those of us privileged to be with you. You are electing to allow your attention to be dragged this way and that by whatever happens by. You are electing to drift through your precious, singular experience, with a bovine, blinking indifference. You are electing to treat as interchangeable the true and the false, the silly and the sophisticated, the foolish and the wise, as well as—in all likelihood—the evil and the good. Because if you do not understand the reality of your moral circumstances, you will do what is right at best by accident. Nor will you be able to discern in the actions of others what is truly good from what would only clothe itself in the garments of goodness, but is in fact callous, self-serving, or cruel.

And so I invite you to take up the immense, the daunting, the seemingly-impossible task of being responsible in all things, such as you find you can. This will involve being present, attentive, inquisitive, and reasonable. But then once you understand correctly what it is you are responsible to do, it will be left to you to decide to do it. You will have to determine if you are willing or not.

Allow me to offer some guidance, however, with this invitation: the beginning of being responsible in all things is to be responsible in the first place for being ‘you’. After all, if you do not, no one can do it for you. Are you willing?

Obstacles to Being You

Each and all of these ways of being you—being present, attentive, inquisitive, reasonable, and responsible—are demanding. They are challenging. They are quite literally calorie-intensive. If you accept my invitation to them and try to embody them, you will discover (I am sorry to report) that you will not be able to maintain them for very long, especially at first. Now, this might owe to some distinctive feature of your biology or psychology. These features might place constraints on your powers of attention or rearrange things as they pass between your experiencing, your question asking, and your striving for answers. It might owe to the kinds of experiences that make certain questions too painful to ask or some answers too upsetting to acknowledge. You might carry addictions that artificially contract your world. There are all kinds of things that get in the way of being you in these ways. They are just, as Victorians used to say, the “liabilities” of being a ‘you’ that is human.

But at first your efforts to maintain presence, attentiveness, inquisitiveness, reasonableness, and responsibility can produce meager results simply for lack of practice. Being ‘you’ in these ways is, really, a kind of skill. And like any new skill, at first you are going to be, frankly, kind of bad at it. The good news is that the basics are available to you. They are something like an infant’s built-in ability to grab things. But much as our ability to hold different things—from forks to pencils to coffee mugs—develops and our strength to hold them securely and at length grows with practice, so too your capacities for being ‘you’ in these ways will grow in strength and sophistication with practice. Like any skill, however, you have to decide, again and again, if you are willing to do the work, if you think it is worth the work to be ‘you’ in these ways. And, as ever, no one can make that decision for you. It is entirely yours to decide how you will be ‘you’.

I could, I suppose, try to persuade you that these skills are worth developing, but I am not sure what purpose it would serve to try to persuade you that paying attention is better than being distracted, that trying to understand is better than blithe ignorance, that being reasonable is better than being foolish, or that being responsible is better than being negligent. If you have decided in favor of the latter in each case, what good would it do to try to capture your attention in order to appeal to your intelligence or rationality or responsibility? You will have already decided these are not worthwhile.

Instead, perhaps I can offer a couple of encouraging words to help you over the inevitable obstacles you will encounter on your way to being you. The first is that, even though being you attentively, inquisitively, reasonably, and responsibly makes demands on you, the real measure of success is… well, you. Sure, you may take inspiration from other people who are being themselves in a way you admire, or you might enroll in some course that provides structure to your pursuit, but ultimately the goal is not to try to be your role models or to succeed in this or that course. The goal is to be you. The goal is to be really, genuinely, extravagantly you.

Finally, I want to remind you that you can relax a little if you want, because you have already succeeded in the unique and irreplaceable feat of being you. You will be you the whole way to being the ‘you’ that you aspire to. You are welcome to enjoy, to treasure all the ‘yous’ that you meet along the way. Indeed, in order to get to the you of your highest aspirations, you have to be able to tolerate, to appreciate, to even delight in the ‘you’ you are right now. You are going to be this ‘you’ for a while and, even short of your aspirations, you are unique and irreplaceable and precious. Self-loathing and self-disgust, I have learned, are just more obstacles to being you. There’s no one else in the whole world just like you and people can like you just the way you are. I have only been suggesting that you are someone worth being on purpose.

© Jonathan Heaps, 2021