Authentic

but to what?

The movie “Some Kind Of Heaven“ is a documentary film about a retirement community in Florida. One of the characters, Reggie Kincer, is having a rather experimental retirement. He has started using drugs and acting out. This annoys his wife because she thinks he is too old for this kind of nonsense.

But he refuses to quit his latter-year search for meaning and fulfilment:

“I’m trying to find myself. I need to find out who I am.”

This desire to ‘find yourself’ is one of the most common things about the spiritual path, along with all kinds of radical behaviours and life choices. It is almost a cliche. When people talk about a friend who is “finding themselves”, they often make quotation marks in the air with their fingers, or roll their eyes.

It seems to me that the desire to find out who you really are is noble. It goes hand in hand with the contemporary fascination with authenticity: if you can find out who you are then you can live authentically. In fact, all kinds of issues and questio…