Muffled whispers and hidden vistas

As always, another brilliant post by the awesome Tom Morgan—whether you agree with him or not. The one thing Tom’s writing consistently does is force you to think.

This post feels especially important and urgent because the issue of people wanting to be someone, yet forcing themselves to be someone else instead, is—and I don’t use this term lightly—an epidemic in modern society. It’s one I see all around me in my friends, and in myself.
This journey of figuring things out is not without its price, but it’s nonetheless a journey we all must make. It’s a pilgrimage to our own hidden selves, so to speak.

Most of us go through the motions of life like zombies, rarely bothering to think about what actually brings us true joy, meaning, or purpose—without ever pausing to ask what our hearts truly yearn for.

For a lot of unlucky people, life doesn’t even grant the chance to imagine where their true north lies, even if they want to. They are forced to play roles, perform tasks, and wear costumes they never chose, simply because survival demands it. This is far more common than we realize. They end up sacrificing a vital part of themselves to do what must be done. Perhaps there is some nobility in that, but it remains a quiet tragedy.

Yet many of us who do have a choice actively resist allowing those spaces in our psyche to unfold—the spaces where the full bloom of our imagination might reveal visions of the life we so desperately crave, but don’t yet know. When the opposite is true, it feels deeply sad, doesn’t it? That we deny ourselves the space to imagine who we might want to be, and deny that self the room to actually emerge. Instead, we erect heavy walls to drown out the whispers trapped under the debris of modernity, ignorance, and indifference—protecting a self we forcibly instantiated and wear like a costume just to keep it from unraveling.

And I often wonder what the configuration of society would look like if more of us actually paid attention to those internal whispers, screams, and calls. If we listened to them exhorting us to move, pointing toward hidden paths overgrown with thick, thorny bushes—paths that, once cleared, open up into worlds unknown.

As is probably obvious just from me writing this short note, I’m grappling to reach for the right words. And perhaps that in itself is a symptom.

One of the topics that has been incredibly alive in all of my conversations over the last few years is authenticity. This theme has accelerated meaningfully in recent weeks.1 Hundreds of people that I speak to are stuck at their desks doing something that they know is ultimately pointless, but do so out of a fear of presenting their own authenticity to the world. As a result, they keep manifesting lives devoid of the one thing that matters most: genuine love. They are ultimately afraid that, if they admit this to themselves or other people, the false safety around them could evaporate. Moreover, many people don’t know what their true gifts are yet, or they suspect that if they offer them to the world, they’ll have nothing like the same kind of financial value and safety. Like Bear, they are terrified that if they reveal their authentic self to the world, they will be rejected.

I’ve recently been exploring a simple theory, and it goes something like this. The later stages of personal evolution, that we typically reach in midlife, are defined by greater energetic sensitivity. Our subtle senses and intuition become much more important in navigating the world. We get better at allocating our energy and attention to the places that matter. This is wisdom. Greater sensitivity requires a more robustly functioning “energetic grid” in our bodies. Some parts of us can get shut down due to trauma. As we reach the points in life where we need to reopen them, we confront these failed or outdated coping mechanisms. This can create crises as we are forced to face old psychological and physical blockages.