I have written and commented on Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata a good deal over the years. A copy sits on my desk at home, and it is more likely than not that I read all or part of it once a week, perhaps more. I have gone through the exercise enough to know that different parts of the Desiderata jump off the page on different days, yet today I focused on two words in the middle that I don’t think I had previously focused on – “Be Yourself.”
At first those two words seem a little silly – I mean, who else would I be? As Oscar Wilde put it: “Be yourself; everybody else is already taken.” Yet while we know those things to be true, I am me and everyone else IS taken, that doesn’t stop us (no matter how irrational) from trying to be something or even someone else. Heck, most all advertisement plays on that. We are bombarded with the images of what or who we could be if only we bought ________. Indeed, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
Thus, Ehrmann’s reminder – “Be yourself.”
It occurs to me... 