To Be AND Not to Be

Each of us is a potential self. We are always becoming someone, whether we know it or not. Sometimes the self we are becoming is a stranger to the selves we have been, and so we stop and reflect and gather up our memories of who we have been, trying to find that hidden strand of the "who we were meant to be" in all those previous becoming selves; and, then with a power deep within but not of ourselves we will to be someone we have always been but will never quite become - "this side of Jordan."

Maybe Shakespeare's Hamlet just missed when he said: "To be or not to be - that is the question." The reality of human life seems "to be and not to be." That is the existence we must live with, celebrate, and sometimes endure in faith. We are those creatures who are born to live with ambiguity within our own selves. If we can make peace with that, we can live some pretty decent lives and accept the ambiguity in others.