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

wear your heart on your sleeve." "Don't make a federal case
out of it." "Don't show them the whites of your eyes." These
are all the cliched ways we tell each other to keep personal
truth apart from public life, lest we make ourselves vulnerable
in that rough-and-tumble realm.

Where do people find the courage to live divided no more
when they know they will be punished for it? The answer I
have seen in the lives of people like Rosa Parks is simple: these
people have transformed the notion of punishment itself. They
have come to understand that no punishment anyone might in-
flict on them could possibly be worse than the punishment they
inflict on themselves by conspiring in their own diminishment.

In the Rosa Parks story, that insight emerges in a wonder-
ful way. After she had sat at the front of the bus for a while, the
police came aboard and said, "You know, if you continue to sit
there, we're going to have to throw you in jail."

Rosa Parks replied, "You may do that. . .," which is a very
polite way of saying, "What could your jail of stone and steel
possibly mean to me, compared to the self-imposed imprison-
ment I've suffered for forty years -- the prison I've just walked
out of by refusing to conspire any longer with this racist
system?"

The punishment imposed on us for claiming true self can
never be worse than the punishment we impose on ourselves
by failing to make that claim. And the converse is true as well:
no reward anyone might give us could possibly be greater than
the reward that comes from living by our own best lights.

LET YOUR LIFE SPEAK

34

Next>

<Previous