I have a story I tell myself. It's the story of myself, the one on which I build my identity. "I'm the on who...." and "this is who I am, that is who I am. These are my beliefs, this is the group I belong to, I never....I always..." It seems silly to say, "Isn't amazing that I go to bed at night and when I wake up in the morning I know who I am?" But it is amazing, that from moment to moment, I carry forward everything I mean when I say "me." William James described what he called the stream of consciousness, the internal continuity of "me-ness." He uses a wonderful metaphor of birds both in flight and perching - our conscious thoughts are the perchings but the flights, the connections, are always there, not rising to be known, but running beneath and unifying all that we mean by "self." "I" am the stream with all its eddies and whirlpools and still surfaces, always in the flow.
It also sounds silly to say how amazed I am that I can have a new idea; I can revise and redefine who I feel I was and who I feel I am now and who I think I'll be in the future. I can learn something new about myself, see things in a different way, have a lifetime of epiphanies. I am able to reflect on myself - I can change my mind. That ability is the glory of consciousness, that ideas and opinions aren't set in stone but are part of the great stream that is always changing, never the same stream twice - such a simple thing, that I can come to see things differently.
I know why I remind myself of all this. This view of my reality tells me I can change, that I can bind up all the fragments and shards inside that I don't understand, and come to feel myself whole, brimming with energy from that stream, constantly moving, reveling in the flow.
I need to keep reminding myself of the possibility of change. All of it ephemeral and also a solid rock to stand on.
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