Life is a wandering, digressing sort of journey that loops, spins, backtracks, and often contradicts itself. The fragile gift of becoming is a rare and difficult art requiring breathing room permitting ourselves to look back at every stage to what we no longer are, shed of the impatient and preconceived notion, a tightness to conformity, or adherence to societal convention. Labels restrict and limit our potential in our early and vulnerable journey of discovering who we are and want to be.
Becoming ourselves, we serve for many years in humble apprenticeship following its difficult way and discovering its different forms of humility and abasement to life’s fierce introduction to all the potential ways of being us. Labels and prejudice attempt to control what we instinctively know cannot be controlled, the wandering, beautiful, terrifying mystery of becoming ourselves.
Prejudice, that attitude in search of evidence, wishes to control that which does not want to be held within the bounds of to narrow a restriction. Labels and prejudice have already determined who we are before we learned to argue our liberating message to imposed restriction. We must resist one of our darker angels, the human tendency to settle too soon into a label of restricting uncertainty, least we sacrifice our potentials deepest reward, becoming who we may in time wish rather to be.