Being and Doing

(Nimue)

In essence of course we all just are. However, humans are storytelling creatures. We particularly love telling stories about who we are and what our experiences mean. These are stories we tell ourselves, and quite often we tell them to other people as well.

I’ve run into quite a lot of spiritual material about putting down our sense of self to focus on the essence of being. I can see how that might bring benefits, but I’m also not sure that fighting those intrinsically human storytelling urges is a good idea. Maybe it would be better to work out how to tell more beneficial stories.

Internalised capitalism encourages us to tell stories about our use and importance. What we earn and what we consume are supposed to be key to our identities. This does no one any good, and there’s a lot to be said for just abandoning such stories.

I derive a lot of my sense of self from what I’m doing – Druidry very much included. Walking, performing, reading, writing, learning, crafting – this is all very much part of my sense of self. This has caused me challenges when illness has cost me some of those things, but hanging on to what I could did help me keep some sense of myself as being more than my unwellness.

I think one of the places people get into trouble is when they base their sense of self on what they imagine they are going to do. It’s very easy to tell stories about what we would do if only we had the time, the opportunity, the patience etc etc. It’s good to have aims and aspirations I think, but letting those take up a lot of space in your identity story can be really problematic. Having too big a story around what you’re going to do can be an obstacle to doing the thing, and it can distort your relationship with reality.

I feel that AI plagiarism really feeds into this, allowing people to develop a misplaced belief in themselves as creators while simultaneously robbing them of the incentive to truly create.

Druid blogger Cat Treadwell used to regularly ask ‘what are you doing?’ and it is a fine question. There is truth in action, in the choices we make and the things we show up for. What are you doing? Knowing yourself through your actions has substance. We might manage to delude ourselves for a while about what our actions mean, but there’s only so far you can go with not getting the results you thought you were going to get. If you aren’t really doing what you think you are doing, that’s inevitable.

The great advantage of focusing on doing as a source of identity stories, is that it encourages us to do interesting stuff. There’s real pleasure in having a good story to tell, and a life lived well is a life that will result in good stories.