“What a man can be, he must be.” says Abraham Maslow, the American psychologist on human potential and growth. I came across this quote while I was preparing for an exam on educational psychology. Some quotes linger a while, some fly even before you could turn to the next page but very few of them resist to leave. “What a man can be, he MUST BE.” Does that sound easy?? Now why am I taking it on myself?? Come let's explore..
Perhaps “what a man can be, he must be” is the most difficult task one can ever go through in their life. To be what one can be. The answer to this may sound easier for some of you who are very clear about who you are and highly declarative of who you can be. But what about some of us who are still learning to puddle our ways slowly in not being or not quite confidently knowing what we will be. I hope this may resonate to few of you but i think this is not the question of being great but being you first. Being you is more difficult than being great. Or more precisely knowing you and then being you. Yes, ‘knowing you’. How about that? Do you know yourself completely? Well, if you ask me, I would definitely say, “I don't know much about who I can be” Not that I can not declare who I am or who I can be, but I can not measure the weight of carrying this question for god knows how long. Some may think this is not a question worth exploring because it's overasked and overexplained but Maslow is asking me not to stop or overlook at it. I am happy i still allow myself to ask such questions. Or atleast try finding answer to it.
Maslow's quote may be a declarative one, but it is not so easy to interpret it as such. What I can be or what you can be is directly linked to what we keep telling about ourselves in the first place. It is not always about knowing who we are capable of but knowing who we are actually allowing ourselves to be. What do we always allow ourselves to be? Do we allow the audacity to be ourselves or the hindrance that stops us at the gate of this very question? Do we allow the confidence to guide us or the blind doubt to silence us? I don't know how it has been for you but I feel like I have been a cat on a wall for so long, almost for all my life till now.. not fixating myself to a strong side or cross the wall of in-betweenness and hold the tree of life or what Maslow calls ‘what a man can be’. So far i have quietly tried to know who I can be. For a large part of my life I have let these barriers and doubts rule my world. The question right now is whether I am ready to shift from this doubtful side of ‘what I can be’ to understand the unexplored side of ‘what I must be’ because as far as what Maslow asserts and what i think, they both are equally proportional and inseparable from each other. and i guess most of us are stuck between these two phases. Retraction and action. Doubt and audacity. Possibility and potentiality. Not knowing and not doing. Or simply knowing and not doing.
Say for example, if you believe you are very good at playing soccer or anything that you like to do for that matter, you will easily know and realize it, within you, that you are going to be someone good in that particular skill which equals to the statement “what a man can be, he must be”. Now let us consider the same phenomenon with a slight change where you do actually know who you can be but do not realize how good you are at it and always end up doubting yourself of “how good you can be” all the while holding onto the same struggle of “what you can not still be” which unfortunately does not reflect the statement of “what a man can be, he must be.” This is because you do not really allow yourself to realize how good you are at something. Even when you think you are not so good at something, it is only the belief you carry. You can be far more capable than that. You can easily untangle this question of who you are allowing yourself to be except for the fact that some of us are quite unaware of the false image taking shape silently at the back of our mind and end up accepting our half- complete or never fully identified image whose ability to learn stops even before facing the real ground.
Now, do all of this point out to a slight mindset change or how well are we mentally equipped to adapt this to our complex nervous system?
But are we really in control of who we can be so that we will learn to be who we must be? Or are we in a hopeless state to simply allow our mind to decide who we can not be and hence conclude who we must not be? Either way, “what a man can be, he must be” still sounds difficult and beyond reach for a little indisciplined tired soul like me. The question about whether being in control or in a hopeless state contributing to your highest potential, i think has very little to do with “what one can be” because i can take myself as an example where most of the times i am neither in control nor in calm to come in terms with “what I can be” but still end up trying to be what I can be in the gentle ways possible right then. Somehow I keep trying to reach to the other side of this never ending chaos of what I can not be or what i would call as ‘existential crisis’. I am not saying that i completely know who i can be but only that I have somehow managed my own way out in tiny bits of hope. For this i choose to do what my soul eagerly yearns to do. I usually take it up as a pressure point to move away from what questions my ultimate state of existence. Below you can see the proof of how I slowly raged against my own doubts and made something to allow myself believe in “who i can be” though i still did not completely know “who i must be.”
I am not trying to say that a disciplined mind or a controlled performance of your ability are of no use to give you any sense of direction to be what you can be. I am not even saying that puddling up against uncertainty and still choosing to do what you think you can do is the only way out to successfully reach “what a man can be, he must be” because as complex human beings, we may never fully know or allow ourselves to be who we are capable of being, we may never completely understand how potentially capable and talented we are to accept what we can be in order to reach what we must be. And sadly in most occasion, “what you can be” ends with what you only deem as “what you can not be”— a knowing that you think has already taken place and you already stop resisting the fight. And more deprivingly what you resist ends with how you stop trying to know who you can still be. But down the road, you learn that this has become a pattern of your own unexplored self. This has always happened with me. Now your job is not to control it or force it to trust in you but slowly understand that you can not escape it unless you gently start to rage against it. Rage in the sense, as allowing yourself to slowly become a powerful, transformative energy towards your deepest yearnings and realize that your soul will never give upon you anytime in life even when you have taken a long retreat from your passion. It's not easy for it's mostly doubting your entire being with frantic emotions now and then filling up your mind when you have to quietly rage against your deepest callings. But only in this dreadful state of existence—you will desperately learn to reach to the other side of uncertainty— of who you can still be. And now, does “what a man can be, he must be” sounds bit achievable?? Maybe not completely or even truly. And i would not say this is all there to it—hitting a rock bottom, being in a hopeless state, learning the pattern or raging against the slow pressure are the only tested solutions to reach Maslow's assertion. Maybe you do not have to accept or aim for “what a man can be, he must be” maybe you have your own way of coming home to yourself just as I do have mine but that doesn't conclude there's no uncertainty or fear or a state of existential crisis to any of it—to me, to you, to all of us because we all do have these desperate feelings every single day when we do not follow our deepest callings. I still keep dreading with it every day and night. I still do not have that audacity to declare who I can be though i somewhat know what I love doing or even believe i can get best at. i still keep doubting every single word or every single portrait even before I head to start it. But you should not forget that i have also diligently learned to slowly rage against my own inabilities. of all these spontaneous emotions and had come to meet myself in the most unguarded ways. I have observed what tested the reasons for my true existence and what had kept me stopping even when nothing actually did. Yes, this is the state of endless void i am talking about but we always have our tiny hearts that resist to give up trying though it has only learned to barely survive.
After all, we still have endless arts, for me its reading, writing and drawing , anything that speak to our beings—saving us.again and again, wanting to choose us. against all the chaos.
Maybe that is why after every wreckage, we still have our relentless souls lingering a little longer in places where we'd already moved on, where we'd already doubted lasting, staying small and yet kept yearning firmly. All these little uncharted patterns of life disguised as doubts and fears only make us believe to reach beyond what's stopping us from both inside and outside. Maybe it's only us and the atmosphere we are being surrounded by— limiting us from being who we can be but does that make the question any easier? Did we learn all the lessons already to know where we can head to be who we can be? As long as the uncertainties, fears and doubts persist, for it will, even when we think we are fully prepared and highly capable of facing chaos. It is good to believe that our complex nervous system is exactly training us to be where we want to be to do what we are meant to do and slowly leading us to where we want to go because through all these silent pauses of doubts and struggles, we are still invisibly raging against our own resistance.
Having not written anything meaningfully here to my soul lately has killed me beyond silence apart from the story of my first flight journey with my father. And that too had demanded so much courage and vulnerability out of me to just complete it and hit the publish button.. Thought I had completed few portraits recently, i could not be so much excited about it. I don't know why. Maybe I am valuing my work less. Or seeing myself from the lens of what I still can not be. But i am proud of what i had tried to be and what i can be right now. I continued editing this draft which I had started six months ago, in a whim to get back to myself and maybe this is how i slowly rage against all the uncertainty to get to know who i can still be—against all the doubts, silence and endless void i'd put on myself and sometimes letting the external world eat me alive even as I slowly learn to understand it.
PS: The whole point of writing this out here is not “not to succumb to myself anymore” but to show up even when all I do is succumb to my life.. Because, I am here—still writing, drawing, feeling and trying as I know to be “who i can be” and letting that be enough for now. let me learn “who i must be” later.
To everyone who feel the same right now, know that you are not alone because within your own heart, you know —you are still moving— you are still trying through tiny bits of hope to be who you can be. It may not feel quite enough, it may not feel any okay but that's how it is and that's how you slowly keep raging against “I feel bad of who I have become to myself”. Maybe we do not have to feel bad of who we can not still be. Maybe who we are already is the key to slowly rage against who we are not meant to be—you are not meant to be the worry or guilt you carry. Everything you'll honestly be and become happens in the most natural and unexpected ways. Just a little rage is all you need to keep yourself going. Miss you and see you again soon.
With love and peace
Revathi Ganesh
“What a Wo/man can be, S/he must be”, the fortunate fate of human life is, “We can be anything", but Choosing “who/what you are, "being you” is enough, walking your journey as you are and facing all oods while you can be anything is what makes You/us Special, precious Soul, human, being,Artist. I believe.
❤️