Is this a sign?
At times, I pause to remember the beginning of this journey. After falling into depression and suffering anxiety for long enough, I chose to seek help. I worked for a few sessions with a psychologist whose attitude conveyed peace to me at all times. Therapy with her consisted, essentially, in reconnecting with my identity and working on it in an intentional and kind way. She gave me some tools, and I decided to look at people or rather, characters that inspired me as a goal.
Most of them fell into the hero archetype, and that was my entry into the world of virtues. From different codes and stories, I began to create my own list of virtues and personality traits I would like to adopt. However, when I had my pages filled with this patchwork of aspirations, they felt rather incomplete.
What is justice? How do I know if I act for my own benefit? To what extent is one being faithful, or simply naïve? Questions like these—and dozens more led me, as you might imagine, to turn to philosophy. I could dwell on this succession of interests up until now, but everything will reveal itself in due time.
The fact is that, at present, I have taken up a previous interest: etiquette and protocol. Back when I first began to explore this topic, I read several manuals that gave me all sorts of advice on how to dress, eat, and behave in different hypothetical situations. For someone who barely left her room, they seemed useful and made my efforts feel productive. When I watched movies where the heroine stood out for her manners, I longed to imitate her. But in the form, the how and when, I did not find what I was looking for.
It didn’t matter how many times I practiced acting with grace or tried to make my voice more pleasant: I simply did not feel that I was internalizing what I was doing. But today, several loose threads have begun to weave a piece that I still don’t know what it is, though it makes sense.
In a post further down, I spoke about living a quiet life or a noisy one, about turning my gaze toward the spiritual… And I recognized something I had already thought about before: what spoke to me was purity of heart. What attracted me to those women of class was not the delicacy of their actions, but the delicacy of what they were.
Recognizing this, and remembering the other times I had tried to approach it by looking for books on how to be kind, today I began to investigate how to be pure of heart. And it turns out there are several Christian authors who write about this; in fact, it is one of the aspirations of monks, for it is the pure of heart who will see God (Matthew 5:8-10).
What was curious was not only the books I found, but what seemed more like a sign. Some might not like what I am about to admit, but I searched high and low for a way to access these books for free. However, the platform I used was not working, nor were its alternatives. As a last resort, I decided to use my university’s online catalog… and they had copies!
In this search I not only found those books, but also what I believe is a sign or, at the very least, an opportunit to try to answer the question I asked myself: “To live a silent life, or to bare my soul to the world?”
I found a book called The Silent Life by Thomas Merton. I haven’t read it yet, I must admit, but it broadly deals with monastic life in the Christian tradition. I don’t know why, but I have a hunch that it will be useful for my path, along with the book Purity of Heart by Anselm Grün.
I cannot wait to read them and share my reflections. I might open a section in my blog to gather these posts, but first I must start reading; my habit is a little rusty.