On Friday morning I headed up the hill on
my bike to UBC for the third time this week. As I put the bike into the lowest
gear and pushed with every ounce of muscle power, I kept thinking to myself,
why am I doing this, why am I headed up the hill again at 8.30am on a Friday
morning? Friday is my day usually for working from home since I have no
teaching or meetings. I was headed up to join my department in a morning of
events leading up to the Vancouver-wide march to City Hall for climate change
action. My reflection as I pedaled up the hill was on who I was doing this for –
did I just want my departmental colleagues to like me or was I doing it because
I truly felt that it was an important event to be a part of. As my breathing
grew shallower and I embarked on the final push up the 6th hill onto
UBC lands, I made peace with myself that I was doing it for me, but truly for
me and not for my ego. I elaborate in this post below.
I have written a lot recently about myself.
This is my blog and so I suppose that is my prerogative. That said I have been
thinking a lot recently about ego. A conversation in the recent past had
someone say to me that ‘I had gotten what I wanted’ in a situation. That is
true, but it left me feeling hollow and sad. In the past year, I have been diving
into how we must sometimes turn inwards in order to find ourselves, but that
this will not ultimately serve us any purpose if the objective of our inward
journey is to serve our own selfish ego. I have written at length here recently
on unpacking a long period of depression, of self-criticism and a failure to
really deeply love myself. I have been learning to nurture my battered sense of
self, which so often lashed out in fear and a sense of unworthiness. So what of
my ego? A question which has emerged often for me in recent months. Why do something?
When is it a situation of getting ‘what I want’ versus getting ‘what is best
for all’?
I am a social being, we are all as humans
social beings. There is though, an important distinction in thinking about
being a social being for our own personal gain and ego, and being a social
being for the greater good of a community, a relationship, a workplace. In learning
to truly love myself, I strive to go about my daily life in thinking about what
I do as impacting on others, and not just what I gain from the interaction. My
ego hums deeply within me seeking to be energized in having my actions and
desires be unselfish. I write here based on my own experience, and as always it
is important that I acknowledge that I have no answers but only lessons I have
learned. As people we serve our egos driven by fear, insecurity and a need to
belong (refer back to my blog entry on belonging). We identify our worth by
what we don’t have rather than what we do have. We reach outwards seeking
validation rather than finding love within ourselves and then just reaching out
selflessly. We can only ‘just reach out’ when it is driven by desire to connect
rather than by gratification of our own ego. We often hear stories of the very
rich being desperately unhappy as they assess all their material wealth, which
is meaningless without human connection. I am reminded of the German-made film
about people in Bangladesh, a country where I experienced and witnessed the
most acute hardship, as being ‘The Happiest People’. The
film focused on community and people working together for something larger than
themselves. Some of the most selfless people in history have enacted the greatest
change because they took action driven by a desire to make the situation better
for all, and not just focusing on themselves.
I am no Greta Thunberg, Autumn Peltier, Lesein
Mutunkei, Alexandria Villasenor, Aditya Mukarji or Leah Namugerwa, but in them
I see hope for humanity. As many have done before them, they appear to be
driven by a true desire to connect and create community around combatting
climate change – a community who can truly move for change. All of these are
young people under the age of 18 being supported by parents, families and communities
because they dared to stand up and say ‘it is not always about me’.
On Friday I joined a department of colleagues
and students electric with the energy of being united against a common cause.
As I sat in the lecture some of my colleagues organized I was struck by a
thought, a short time ago I would have felt angry that they had not included me
as one of the presenters to our students, but on Friday I just felt such great
joy that it was happening and that I was witnessing it. As we joined the
student led rally on campus, and then took off down the hills on our bikes I
kept that thought in mind – I am here because I want to be because I am part of
something bigger than myself. Maybe I will or maybe I won’t ever do something
like Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, Harriet Tubman, Befeqadu Hailu or the young
climate activists above, but I can strive to have my actions and my desires be
bigger than myself. Connection, compromise and compassion, these are my lessons
for you. Sometimes I will indeed get ‘what I want’ but I hope that this ‘want’ will
come from what the best need of the community, the relationship, the workplace,
and is because I have listened and participated in something bigger than
myself. Ultimately it is the difference of surviving and thriving in life. To
survive is to focus on our selfish ego, fulfilling our own basic needs; thriving
I sense is an attempt to transcend the selfish ego, not out of fear but out of
desire and yearning to be part of something bigger than oneself.
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| Signs made ready to head to the rally |
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| This signed certainly 'fueled' my thoughts on ego |
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| Cycling down Broadway closing one of the main streets in Vancouver to traffic! |
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