The Illusion of Authenticity

exploring the paradox of containing and expressing

I am currently frothing at the flow of creative ideas moving through me, but I desire to greet them with the maturity of a slow pursuit rather than the intensity of a youthful lust. Though I am still passionate and fiery, I am contained. I no longer set the entire forest ablaze, I’ve learned to use my flame to warm me and bring my pot to a boil. I know just how to tender and stoke my fire.

I’ve been under the impression that when one contains themselves, they are being inauthentic. That by controlling our expression we are not being the fullness of ourselves. How easily I forget this life is paradoxical. To experience fullness, I must contain. I may only have a full glass seeing that I have a container.

Should we allow scrap metal to remain its “fullness” or should we bend and shape, expand and shrink it? Is scrap metal still scrap metal even if we bend and cut it? It seems we are all for expanding and devalue “shrinking”. What if the one consciously choosing to bend, cut away, and consolidate is you? What if life is simply a fun game of taming the wild? Or, instead of taming we may think about it as living in harmonious reciprocity with it.

None of us call sex or “love-making” orgasm, because while climax is nice, it is not the point. The process is required, and the longer the process, the longer you can contain, the more energy that builds and causes a greater release. Song is not chorus. A repeated chorus without verse, without contrast, rising and falling, without dynamic, there is no story, no meaning, no feeling. Yet, unconsciously on a collective level I believe we are all under the illusion that fullness or authenticity, climax or chorus, is some place to pursue, arrive at, and maintain.

We often view life as a problem to solve and ourselves as a project to fix, but we are, and it is simply a balancing act which requires us to constantly be engaged. Balance can be often perceived as a form of stillness, but that is false. Balance is controlling the movement. You’re shifting weight from heel to toe, anterior to posterior, extending arms forward and back. It may appear still, but beneath the surface there is constant movement.

It is true that even if you find yourself losing stability and crouching down, shrinking, or wildly flailing with eyes wide, like some fire out of control, it is all you. The fire dwindles to a flicker or our metaphorical see-saw teters too far to the right and we adopt some belief that we are unskilled, not operating from our full authenticity, or being our “higher” selves.

However, all of life is moving, and we are life also. So, we are life engaging with life, which means, we are constant movement engaging with constant movement. Knowing this allows me to realize how unrealistic the expectation to arrive and remain anywhere is. Also, would that even be desirable? I may listen to a song and my favorite part be the chorus, but if I were to repeat that devoid of the verses leading and following it, I would ruin it. To know anything we must experience it’s contrast. The fullness comes from all the parts that may exist in different spaces in time (not all at once).

A full song isn’t three minutes played in one second. It is first the intro, the verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge, etc.. the intro occurs in the first twenty seconds, the pre-chorus thirty seconds to a minute, and so on. “You can have it all, but not all at once.” Someone said that, I believe it. To have it all at once would be overstimulating and so hard to know the individual notes that each uniquely play a role in delivering the message, the story, the feeling.

Whether you find yourself in a season of balance or instability, building or cascading, flickering or engulfing, it is all you. The flame is still fire regardless of how big or small the flame, despite how it expresses itself any given moment, it is it’s fullness.

We are beings who contain everything, infinite complexity exists within. Our external worlds mirror this also. Life within and without contains everything, it has the space to hold opposites harmoniously- light and dark, truth and illusion, creating and destroying, balance and instability. They rely on one another, they are one, opposite ends of the same stick. The fullness is not in the “ideal” sides of this stick- balance, light, truth, creating. Fullness is in both and like the song, different notes are played at different times so they can create a song, a story, otherwise it’s just noise.

Too much of a good thing can quickly become a bad thing, which is why it is necessary for us to contain. Containing is not in opposition to authenticity it is a necessary part of it. There is nothing wrong with crafting and shaping, shrinking and expanding. There is nothing wrong with trying to stay balanced. The only thing wrong is the idea that we are only ourselves in one aspect of expression, when we believe we are only ourselves at the ideal points in which we boil water or evenly balance the planes. We are constantly moving within constant movement, to think we are one thing and could possibly remain one thing is recipe for suffering because it is in opposition to life. It is fixed and life is flow. Fullness isn’t being without a container, it is creating the container that can hold it all.