What stops you from seeing your greatness?
I am not great. If you notice any voice in you saying anything in this ballpark, how did you come to this knowing? Likewise, if your answer is positive, how do you know?
For many who I have met, including myself, it seems harder for us to be with the notion of our greatness than of our lack of it. If we do not think of ourselves as great, what do we perceive we are?
Personally, I flee from mediocrity. What is ironic is that something in me deeply believed this to be true, while also fearing that it is true, and in my resistance toward this belief (that has not been proven true), I sent myself running away from myself.
How ’bout we flip it around? Instead of proving our greatness, how do we convince ourselves we are not great? This can be a rich mine, where we reveal to ourselves some of our limiting beliefs.
Mine goes something like this: I have not done anything great; I have not accomplished anything worth mentioning; I have not contributed to humanity. I cannot find evidence of greatness, hence, I come to the verdict, the only possible explanation: I am nothing great. Does that sound convincing?
Let us turn toward unpacking greatness a little.
The word greatness has its roots in magnitude, used to describe something that is of bigness; largeness. From there, it also came to refer to the quality of being distinguished.
Consider a mountain, especially if you have stood in the presence of one before. Pretty straightforward to experience its greatness. Its sheer mass is an undeniable reality; we do not need to convince ourselves of its greatness, we immediately feel it.
However, in the case of a bee, a little more is required. We may not instantly recognize its greatness till we see the hives they have built or the honey they have gathered. Moreover, rather than its greatness, their may seem more apparent and accessible to our minds in view of the colony. There seems to be a need to furnish our minds with explanations to support what our plain sight is unable to pick up. An outcome—hive or honey—seems to be necessary for us to agree on their greatness; a need to know what they are capable of—a need, non-existent, with the mountain.
What if greatness is determined by our attention? The mountain’s greatness is beyond doubt because it fills our attention, or perhaps, our attention cannot even take in the whole of it. Imagine looking through a macro lens at a dewdrop and seeing the entire world encapsulated in it. How do you feel?
What if our inability to see greatness has nothing to do with that which we see, but has everything to do with the quality of our attention? What we bring attention to grows in greatness; what we bring love to blossoms.
When we think we know, and have seen, all of ourselves, we become smaller in our view. And hence, like how we view the bee, we may now feel the need to strive exponentially harder to create and acquire evidences of greatness. Our disconnection from our greatness sends us seeking for tangible connections to greatness. We acquire material wealth and successes; we acquire relationships; we acquire knowledge and skills. We acquire and carry more load to become great like mountains. And I want to supply a caveat here that I am not making any of what I have listed wrong. What is important here are the motivation and intention we hold when working toward these things.
Is greatness solely a point of view; is there no aspect of objectivity? I think we can agree that what is great seizes all of our attention, and takes our breath away. Following that, we may experience a plethora of shifting emotions as we stay with greatness—wonder, awe, reverence, gratitude, humility, and more.
Life, in itself, is great. What comes along with it may be debatable. What of myself would I say is great? The very life that courses through me, yes. But when I say this, am I separating myself from this very life, and what is this “I”? Who am I identifying with? At the same time, I do not think my personality is great, yet how can it not be if this life shaped part of itself to be this personality and survived this far? Currently, it seems beyond my mind to comprehend greatness. Even if my logic checks out, I may prove or disprove my greatness but remain far from it.
On the contrary, as I place my felt attention on the breath in my belly, stillness descends. My ears—cupped by silence erasing the noise. The breath in the heart joins in the concerto, followed by the breath in the head. Then…bommm…the timpani of silence strikes. The breath in my solar plexus beats. Mightily. Fusing all my attention into a single breath.
Momentarily, viewpoints disappear; identities dissolve.
What do you say of the breath that silences everything?
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Hello & welcome — I am glad you are here. I am Rosslyn Chay, an inquirer, poet, and coach. The Dandelion Notes are field notes on my process and learnings through my human journey as I go on a quest to mend our fractured relationship with our nature.
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