making yourself up as you go along

You are making yourself up as you go along

I don't know whether you've seen the Monty Python film, Life of Brian. It's well worth watching, humorous, but also quite pertinent. And at one point in this film, our hero, Brian, is, by circumstances beyond his control, put in a situation where he's having to make up a parable. He's making it up on the spot and of course people can tell. At one point one of the people listening says he's making it up as he goes along. It's absolutely true, he was. And I say all this because each of us, in a way, is making it up as we go along.

What we say to other people about ourselves is really a story. It's a creation of our mind. Of course, we have memories of things that have happened to us, events in the past, and we have a sort of identity that society expects us to live up to. And so the story we create is based on these memories and this official identity. But if you watch closely, you will see that you are colouring this story, depending on who you are talking to. In your workplace you will present one flavour of yourself. At home with your family, you will present another. And when you meet a potential lover, someone you are attracted to, you will probably paint an even more colourful version of yourself – one that you think will be appealing to that person. When you are relaxing with friends, you will present yet another version of yourself. And it's not that one of these versions of your story is more true than the next. You are simply making it all up as you go along, who you are, who you tell other people you are, but also who you tell yourself that you are. It's all a fabrication.

You are making yourself up as you go along. And why do we do this? Somehow, as a society, we expect this of each other. We demand each other to have a story about ourselves. And the really odd thing is, even when we are alone, our mind can carry on this nonsense. Alone we do not need a story at all, But the mind has become so habitual in its machinations that it tends to carry on creating a story, even though it's only for our own consumption.

And whilst we believe this story about ourself, we are missing who we really are. Each of us is hiding the truth from ourself, by this endless, creative narrative that we tell ourselves and other people as to who we are. And it is tremendously difficult to drop this, to see that we are creating a fiction all the time, a fiction about ourself. It's as if we are writing a novel where we are the central character. But it is not true. It is merely fiction.

And the first step in discovering who we really are, is to see that everything that we currently think ourselves to be is not really true. It has no substance to it. It's like a cartoon character we've drawn on a piece of paper. There's no harm in it in a sense, except if we believe it. When we believe this fiction to be something that it is not, when we believe it to be our true identity, then there is a problem. Then we have put ourselves in a very difficult situation. That belief means that we start investing energy in sustaining the myth. We want that fiction to be truth. But it simply isn't. So we go to all sorts of lengths to try and reinforce the story about ourself. And we might think we're doing this for other people, but really we're doing it for ourself. Our ego demands it. Our ego is this story we tell ourself. And only when we can let go of all that, when we can see that it is purely fiction, only then are we in a place to even ask the question who am I really? And that's an important question to ask. So let us at least take that first step, and see that we are all making it up as we go along.