An Authentic Life

My auto­bi­og­ra­phy is com­ing along quite well. I started at the begin­ning, edited every­thing I pre­vi­ously wrote, and con­cluded it close to the present. One ben­e­fit of writ­ing an auto­bi­og­ra­phy is putting my life in perspective–seeing the big pic­ture and objec­tively look­ing at it as story. A ter­ri­ble strug­gle at the time makes a good story today.

I’ve long said, “I live life as art.” I worked on this book for twenty-seven years. It’s a work of art too. I go over it repeat­edly and keep adding a lit­tle color here, a lit­tle detail there, some nuance, a new light until it’s finished.

Over the years, it had a num­ber of titles: An Amer­i­can Sid­dhartha (after Her­mann Hesse’s book), Saf­fron, Full Cir­cle, and now An Authen­tic Life. I was writ­ing and looked up “authen­tic” in my com­puter dic­tio­nary. It said:

❧ Authen­tic: (in exis­ten­tial­ist phi­los­o­phy) relat­ing to or denot­ing an emo­tion­ally appro­pri­ate, sig­nif­i­cant, pur­po­sive, and respon­si­ble mode of human life. (New Oxford Amer­i­can Dic­tio­nary)

That res­onated as how I try to live my life. It also got me back in touch with my exis­ten­tial­ist roots as I researched the idea. I came upon this quote that rein­forces the other:

❧ Authen­tic­ity is a tech­ni­cal term in exis­ten­tial­ist phi­los­o­phy, and is also used in the phi­los­o­phy of art and psy­chol­ogy. In phi­los­o­phy, the con­scious self is seen as com­ing to terms with being in a mate­r­ial world and with encoun­ter­ing exter­nal forces, pres­sures and influ­ences which are very dif­fer­ent from, and other than, itself. Authen­tic­ity is the degree to which one is true to one’s own per­son­al­ity, spirit, or char­ac­ter, despite these pres­sures. (Wikipedia)

As I make the next pass through the man­u­script, I will use the theme of authen­tic­ity as a fil­ter to tie the whole thing together. Whether deal­ing with my father, guru, fam­ily, soci­ety, or employ­ers, the con­flict boils down to who they want me to be ver­sus who I am. I am true to myself, often at great per­sonal cost. I take full respon­si­bil­ity for the choices I made, the life I live, and who I am. I am con­tent and happy with the result.

As Mick said, “You can’t always get what you want, but you just might find you get what you need.” Aloha.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2012 at 12:44 and is filed under Jungle dispatch and tagged with authentic, authenticity, autobiography, Steve Bohlert. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.