Be yourself

The ultimate joy of life is to be yourself.

Oscar Wilde famously said, “be yourself, everyone else is already taken.”

It is easier to take a statement like this from someone who so flamboyantly and wholeheartedly lived it. A prolific journalist, playwright, author and poet; he was, for a time the darling of Victorian London. Being born to privilege and education was something which he embraced and used to advance the talent which he so obviously possessed. In a time where social advancement was as prickly and difficult a sea to navigate as it is in our day, his career began to unravel with the accusations and subsequent convictions relating to his personal affairs.

Regardless of any opinions we may hold about the law of his day or his two years of incarceration under hard labour, he lived his credo and ultimately paid the piper before his early demise at 46.

Being yourself is a downright pain in the proverbial at times. I had written this completely yesterday and was happy with the content and subject, but when I published the end product it was an earlier saved version and not the fully completed one.

In the hours that followed I proceeded to stumble and trip over most of the aspirations and clever sounding ideals that I had written; I subsequently deleted 80% of the article and have returned to the beginning.

Being yourself is also an ideal that by necessity must come with a caveat; as a young person I displayed a remarkable aptitude for lying and shoplifting, now although these are skills which I was naturally good at they are not in any way socially or legally acceptable. I also come from a long line of accurate marksmen,  a talent which has passed on to my son; but since the gun amnesty which followed the Dunblane shootings in Scotland there is little or no tolerance for weapons outside of country estates and wonky fair ground versions.

The point remains that each of us has natural gifts that set us apart from those around us. What we need to be able to do is master the art of harnessing those talents which are of a positive and upbuilding nature, which can enhance the world in which we live. By that I mean our world, not necessarily the wider world; we can’t all be world changers but we can change ‘our’ world.

Having lived through a period of disliking most of what I saw in myself and seeing nothing of positive possibilities; I know how hard it can be to climb back out of that hole. But standing at the bottom (can I assure you that you will hit the bottom at some point) of it in the silence, alone, gave room for reflection.

Those swirling spiralling thoughts that drove me to near lunacy are the same swirling thoughts that are now written in front of you. Instead of being inward focussed and continually negative they are now outward seeking and occupied with new knowledge.

Yesterday was a blip on an otherwise good week, you will have them as you climb onwards, but the blips if used wisely can adjust loose thinking and refocus it once again.

Be yourself, but the better you.