Always More Than I Think

There was a moment — I can’t place it exactly, which feels right — when I noticed I had spent the first half of my life telling myself I was too young, and the second half telling myself I was too old.

Different words. The same cage.

I had been arguing for my limitations for as long as I could remember. Not loudly. Quietly. The way you argue for something you’ve decided is true before you’ve examined it. I wasn’t arguing against possibility. I was arguing against myself.

When I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

What I understood in that moment — not as philosophy, but as something closer to fact — is that I was never meant to arrive at one fixed version of myself and stop there. I was always in the state of becoming. Had always been. The question was only whether I would devote myself to that state or spend my energy resisting it.

I chose devotion.

Not devotion to becoming, exactly. Devotion of self. Devotion to something is still transactional — there’s a goal, a destination, a return on the offering. Devotion of self is different. It’s the giving of yourself wholly to the practice, the way a monk gives himself to prayer. The prayer isn’t the destination. The giving is.

That’s what becoming means to me. Not a destination. A devotion.

Acceptance is what made it possible.

Not acceptance as defeat. Not the gray, exhausted kind that says this is just how things are. The other kind. The kind that looks at everything — the years of chaos and hunger and close calls and losses and limitations argued for — and understands that all of it was load-bearing. That nothing was wasted. That every hard thing carried me to this moment.

And this moment is where I actually live.

The past doesn’t need to be fixed or redeemed or finally understood. It needs to be allowed to be what it was. When I stopped fighting it and started standing on it, something shifted. The ground became solid for the first time.

What I do with this moment counts more than the accumulated weight of every moment before it. And what I do in this moment determines what becomes possible in the next.

That’s not optimism. That’s just how time works.

I’ve spent most of my life being more than I thought I was, without knowing it.

More capable than I claimed. More feeling than I admitted. More connected to other people than I was supposed to be.

What I’m learning, slowly, at sixty-seven, is that the becoming was never only mine.

There are no unrelated actions. Nothing exists in isolation. What I do — how I show up, what I write, what I choose in this moment and the next — participates in something larger than my own story. I am a man, a being, a spirit and a soul, and I play a part in everything that exists and is becoming. That’s not grandiosity. It’s the opposite. It’s the recognition that my existence has always been an act of contribution.

The protector in me believed his value was in what he could carry for other people. What I’m finding now is simpler and stranger: that presence itself is the offering. That becoming — honestly, devotedly, without destination — is something I do not just for myself, but as part of the larger unfolding that includes everyone I’ve loved, everyone I’ve failed, everyone still finding their way.

I am always more than I think.

More than I do.

More than I am, in any given moment.

And that more — that persistent, unfinished, unfolding more — is not a problem to solve.

It’s the whole point.

—sh