The Limits of Conformity

We work in cubicles; we sit in chairs; we drive in cars, all giving form to our postures, postures shaped by the designs of others. The things we use are not made for our bodies alone; we form ourselves by taking on the postures and movements required by the things made for others. Taking a seat at a desk, reading a report, solving a problem, all as practiced by generations of others, we make ourselves into "professionals," and in doing so we make ourselves according to the forms of others. Even beyond our professional lives, traveling, falling in love, we give our experiences form by identifying them with the words and names used by everyone else. We seek education and a career; we seek the paths that others seek, by turning to goals to which others also turn.

For better or worse, living consists largely in an inevitable process of repetition, in doing and learning what others have already done and learned. We emerge as waves on a sea of life that extends distantly to the past and infinitely into the future. To live and learn is to become yet another: Another daughter, another son, another parent, another employee sitting at yet another desk, one of a series.

Yet, life is more than repetition; it is a movement of repetition and difference. (All repetition entails difference, and vice versa.) And learning how to live also involves developing the ability to understand and embrace our singularity, our difference from others. These are not easy tasks, especially when we consider how much of life is formed on the model and mold of others.

Plus, well, we’re busy. And amidst all our business of being busy, most of us try to muddle through life as best we can, willing to change in certain respects, resisting change in others. It is this resistance to change that is one of the hallmarks of our social lives. In-and-as the public version of ourselves, we have a tendency to blindly follow the leader, or to unquestioningly get in line. And yet, in the end, we always pay a price if we continue to live a life that is inwardly dictated by others, if we remain so mesmerized by our fear of the unknown that we no longer have a clue as to what it is that we really want out of life. But I would argue that the pain of awakening to the limits of our more conventional public selves is crucial, at least if it helps us to cross some inner threshold, so that we can begin to open up to something more.

Unfortunately, in our attempts to understand ourselves, we must often pass through a twisting labyrinth of funhouse mirrors. We perhaps think that we are becoming more spontaneous and free, only to discover that we have just been impulsive and stupid. We perhaps fight against passive acquiescence to social norms, only to discover that we are merely playing out its perverse flip side in the form of our knee-jerk rebellion against authority.

Genuine and worthwhile change does not come from an arbitrary effort of will or some strained insistence on being different. For myself at least, when I try overly hard to change, when my jaw is clenched with the effort to force myself to be better than I am, I often notice that there is a lot of hidden anxiety and self- judgment underneath all of that effort—deeply engrained emotional patterns and habits that are, themselves, some of the very aspects of myself that I might be attempting to change!

I have no easy advice on how to come in touch, once and for all, with some some singular dimension of yourself. I do, however, believe that this “me” is what is undoubtedly genuinely real in all of us. Yet this “me” is also what cannot be pinned down, cannot be analyzed or dissected. When I was younger, all my attempts to grasp some actual sense of self only led to my sense that there was in fact no “it” to find, no solid, unchanging essence of “me-ness” anywhere. As soon as I came upon myself, I was already gone. As soon as I turned around to see myself, I had already and disappeared.

And yet, every once-in-a-while, I believe we experience these rare, precious moments when we are given a taste of what we are longing for, a quick glimpse into ourselves; but this self is not so much discovered as set free in a state of creativity.

But how, specifically, do we recognize, let alone learn from these moments? How do we become who we are? For me, a good beginning, has been to pay attention to how I feel when it seems, at least in retrospect, that I have gone in the opposite direction, when I am living my life in a way that seems contrary to some deeply-rooted sense of myself. It’s not enough to “know thyself.” You must stand as your own lifeguard; keep a careful watch for those times when you find yourself drawn or driven adrift by anxiety, obsessed with what others think of you, or seeking to match yourself to some invisible social rules and expectations. In those moments, shift your orientation—inward, away from the chaotic movement of outward events; pause; take some deep breaths and settle down into yourself, bit by bit.

Something almost magical often happens when we allow ourselves to let go of fretting and self-judgment, when we sink below the obsessive and self-propelled tapes of anxiety or regret or anger that might be playing in our minds, when we simply ground ourselves to our bodily sensations and open up.

Such moments have always brought me a sense of solidity and ease, a feeling that I am rooted in a level of experience that is uniquely “me.” These moments do not come easily. They come like a distant call, or the muted hum of a vibrating phone. We must listen for them amidst the buzz and whirl of daily life. Are you listening?