Who Are You These Days? Are you an Original Presence?
We can define our lives with terms given to us by others, whether friends or adversaries. But isn’t this just reactionary, what everybody else is doing?
Who is writing the scripts of our lives?
Can we be an original presence?
Consider this idea:
“… an original presence is needed, a presence in accord with our originality. The right to exist and to act anywhere and in any case does not derive from following others’ methods, but from what we are.
A presence is original when it springs forth from the consciousness of one’s own identity and one’s affection for it, and finds its consistence in this.”
-Notes from a talk by Luigi Giussani to a group of university students in Riccione, Italy, in October 1976
To be an original presence is to be authentic, the real you, not somebody that fits in with what other people think we ought to be. It isn’t about the Instagram loves and the Facebook likes.
We obviously live and breathe within our current culture and often we are unconscious of how much it impacts us. We use someone else’s concepts, constructs, boundaries, conditions, agenda.
Maybe it’s time to shut some of this out a bit, and sit down with ourselves; time to listen to our core while we still can.
And so we are back to our original question “Who are you?”