Reclaiming Integrity

Never saw a baby that wasn't full of integrity. Come to think of it, it must have been so for me as well. We all burst onto the planet 100% true to ourselves. We knew our purpose - to be deliriously happy in the special way that pleased us.

In due course, we set about the inevitable task of growing up. And here our clear purpose comes into question. Happy babies are just fine, but they have to adapt to a cruel world, so parents and other adults teach them the skills they need.

The foremost skill is the skill of getting along. There are all those other separate bodies and personalities to get along with, and older ones, who have absorbed the counsel of generations and know how to use the system for getting along, will help to teach a baby that system. If only babies will comply.

So babies do learn to comply, (or suffer the consequences) and in learning how to comply they offer up bits of their integrity. Bit by bit they set aside pieces of their authentic selves in order to get along. Innocence is lost early, replaced by judgment of self and others. Creativity is cut back, cooperation is traded in for competition, and play is diminished.

Though it didn't start out that way, by the time a child goes to school, she or he has betrayed much of themselves, probably thinking that every other child fits in the system, and it is only they who do not, who cannot not have their deepest desires and still get along. So it was with me. I sacrificed the parts of me that family and community asked and I was left with a hollow place in me.

You know the rest of the story, the search for identity, the quest for purpose in life, the great sadnesses and the self destructive choices. This is true for all of us.

What you may not know so clearly is that the child remains within us, and even though our real life parenting may not have always served us well, now that we are parents or of parenting age, we can redo the faulty parenting. We can reclaim the integrity that we began with.

All is not lost. The sacrifices we made in our first years on the planet have merely been set aside. They wait for us and are begging to be ransomed. Our mission in life, our fantastic aptitude for cooperation, our predilection for forgiveness, our unbounded creativity and even our sense of play await.

Time to reclaim our integrity!