"Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about un-becoming everything that isn’t really you so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place."  

-Paolo Coelho

Today I sat in a garden of roses with a two year old. I was laying down with a hat over my face attempting to nap, and this little human who I had never met before gets down onto her hands and knees and peeks under the hat. She says hello, and then instructs me how to play peek-a-boo. I immediately fall into a fit of laughter, while the mom starts to apologize and then ends up laughing too. Evaline and I spent the rest of the afternoon spinning in circles, running barefoot over dirt and trying mixed drinks of soda, juice, and strawberries. When she has to pee she informs us "I do not want to pee in my pants." There is beauty in this innocence.

I often fantasize what a world would be like if we interacted like children. If we approached the people we were interested in, fearlessly, with no question of their motives. If we said "I like you," and "I don't like you," by trusting some internal compass built into our systems. If when someone doesn't like us, instead of asking "why" or "what am I doing wrong" we simply moved on. It is not this simple, but what if. 

Children are engaged with the world. There is no future beyond what they can see. They touch, and taste, and smell everything. The pile of dirt is as interesting as the strawberries bouncing in champagne as the girl sleeping under a sun hat. They are led by their curiosity and thought is intertwined in action. This level of being is free from the chains of self-awareness. There is no thought of how they are being perceived in the world, they just are what they are. 

I've spent a lot of time cultivating this innocence within myself. Of staying open, and curious, and alive and present. I am unbecoming things I thought I was by shaking people, and lifestyles, and activities from my life. Our lives are reflections, and the people and things we spend time reflecting with dig deeply down into our soul. While I often wish that I could exist without asking the existential "whys," lately I have been enjoying the journey of rational-emotional thought. Of deep feeling, presence and play mixed with the ability to process and understand what is happening. There is an art to presence. Of really feeling what things and people make you happy, and then making time and room for those things. 

I catch myself often, in awe, of what a gift it is to be a human. To be struck by the beauty of a sunset to the point of tears while letting the chill of an ocean that touches the whole world wash over me, and to feel loved deeply and fully because I can love deeply and fully. I have chosen a path that finds happiness and joy in the every day. A path that seeks meaning in the mundane, and depth in lunchtime conversation. I am learning to listen to my body, about which people, places, and things help me touch the magic. The magic that is all around us, keeping a few billion people alive on a planet moving through space, with hearts and lungs in every single one. 

When I think about who I am, I think about myself as a child. What interests and curiosities I followed without question of how they would be received. Who I gravitated towards, and what I gravitated from. Freedom from hidden motives and agendas. I am not on a rush to get anywhere, but I am in a hurry to be here now. To be what I am when the world falls away, unbecoming the shit I've collected along the way, and falling back into the world that sustains me. 

Because I'm starting to think that the more we do the things we love, the more we become who we are naturally. When we get lost in the world around us we find the world within us that makes us feel alive. The journey isn't to become something, it is to be the something you always have been.