The Courage to be Yourself…an excerpt from “The Marginalian”.

“It is an ongoing mystery: What makes you and your childhood self the same person. Across a lifetime of physiological and psychological change, some center holds. Eudora Welty called it “the continuous thread of revelation.” Walt Whitman saw it as something “independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal.” Complexity theory traces it to the quantum foam. 
The best shorthand we have for it is soul.” …

The Courage to Be Yourself: Virginia Woolf on How to Hear Your Soul

BY MARIA POPOVA

this fascinating article continues with Virginia Woolf’s ‘take’ on the soul….

Contemplating the soul — that most private part of us — as “so complex, so indefinite, corresponding so little to the version which does duty for her in public,” she writes:
Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself. This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.
That courage is what Whitman celebrated when he decreed to “dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.” Only by listening to the voice of the soul — a voice by definition nonconformist, rising above the din of convention and expectation and should — do we become fully and happily ourselves. To be aware of ourselves is to hear that voice. To be content in ourselves is to listen to it. Woolf writes:
The man* who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream. Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

The Courage to Be Yourself: Virginia Woolf on How to Hear Your Soul

BY MARIA POPOVA