Let Your Life Speak
by Parker J. Palmer
Chapter II
"Now I Become Myself"
Copyright ©2000 by Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers
San Francisco, CA

When we lose track of true self, how can we pick up the
trail? One way is to seek clues in stories from our younger
years, years when we lived closer to our birthright gifts. A few
years ago, I found some clues to myself in a time machine of
sorts. A friend sent me a tattered copy of my high school news--
paper from May 1957 in which I had been interviewed about
what I intended to do with my life. With the certainty to be
expected of a high school senior, I told the interviewer that I
would become a naval aviator and then take up a career in
advertising.

I was indeed "wearing other people's faces," and I can tell
you exactly whose they were. My father worked with a man
who had once been a navy pilot. He was Irish, charismatic,
romantic, full of the wild blue yonder and a fair share of the
blarney, and I wanted to be like him. The father of one of my
boyhood friends was in advertising, and though I did not yearn
to take on his persona, which was too buttoned-down for my
taste, I did yearn for the fast car and other large toys that
seemed to be the accessories of his selfhood!

These self-prophecies, now over forty years old, seem
wildly misguided for a person who eventually became a
Quaker, a would-be pacifist, a writer, and an activist. Taken lit-
erally, they illustrate how early in life we can lose track of who
we are. But inspected through the lens of paradox, my desire
to become an aviator and an advertiser contain clues to the
core of true self that would take many years to emerge: clues,
by definition, are coded and must be deciphered.

Now I Become Myself

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