Back in the days when I was growing in my career I did the periodic, obligatory networking events. I am by nature an extroverted introvert – I like being around people but I loathe working a room, so the events were always dreaded and I was not good at them. Maybe the issue was that I wasn’t that motivated by growing a network or climbing the ladder or what have you, but I always felt like we were all missing the opportunity to share the fullness of ourselves as we shared only the pieces that would or might be useful in the pursuit of some unknown opportunity.

Even when I was a part of smaller groups the exercise of introducing yourself by name, who you worked for, title or what you did, felt like it just missed the parts that I was most interested in. I suppose it is for the same reason that I am not a fan of social media, the curated image of how you want to be seen without the more interesting parts that create the nuance of who you are, the ways we might really connect with one another, those are all missing.

I am now in the second half of my life, literally and I hope metaphorically per Richard Rohr, and I am thinking a lot about not just the ‘what’ of my life, but the ‘who’ of my life. Who I am is not the same thing as what I am because what I am changes and shifts and responds to new needs and circumstances as I move along. I was the mother of young children and that required a different kind of parenting; now I am the mother of adults and I have to learn what that means in a whole new way.

‘Who’ is more about the being-ness of my existence, the ‘what’ is more about the doing-ness, and I have this sense that we would all be better off if we spent more time in being who we are than in doing what we identify as ourselves. This is not a new idea.

When you get too caught up in the doing part of your life you run the risk of becoming that thing and nothing more. I am an X, whatever that is for you, is not the being of your existence. It is the thing that you are doing. We move through phases of life that ask different things of us, that require different skills, and as we have different aspects of ourselves to offer what do we miss if we keep trying to do the same thing we have always done? Once you could lift fifty pounds, what then when you cannot? We live in a time and place where there can be more than that one thing you did, and yet we hold on to that identity of the doer at a cost to our own growth and the opportunity for growth for others.

I don’t think that once you hit a certain age you should retire from the world, you should stop sharing your skills, or stop being a vital participant. I do think that we need to release ourselves from our doing identity in order to flexibly, and creatively offer our present being to new opportunities. I’m not talking about leaving work and learning to knit, though there is nothing wrong with knitting. I mean that we need to not be afraid to say, ‘I am not a senator,’ or ‘I am not the CFO,’ but to instead say I have given my skills in this place for this purpose, and now I am ready to allow the creative movement of a new person in this place and the creative movement of showing up as more than just the title I held for these last many years.

We get stuck in places of identifying with what we do because we don’t know how to value ourselves beyond that social role, we don’t know how to be more or different than what we have already done; we get scared of letting go of the known and once we are afraid of something we grasp so tightly there is no space for anything else to present itself. And the truth is we like it to be easy: ‘hi, my name is —, I am a —.’ We know what to do with that, both for the people we meet and for ourselves. It requires no faith to cling to our known identify, no real trust that God will show up and give us something new.

“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” -John 12:24-25, NRSV

Letting go of the ‘what’ I am right now is scary, trusting that ‘who’ I am can flourish really can feel like a death. Richard Rohr talks about that in Falling Upward as the ego death; I think of it as like the peeling away of a an old skin that lets growth emerge. The process is hard, no question. I just wonder, for myself, for all of us, how much more can you be when you allow the where of your life to invite the what you need to do based on the core of who you are?