The road to soul-searching .

One of the maxims my late mother used to nurture us into virtuous, respectable people was, "Let your life speak." What I found so fascinating about this particular maxim among the many that she used to raise us up into children she could be proud of, is that, to me its meaning kept changing as I grew up.

My early youth understanding of "Let your life speak" led me to conjure up the highest values I could imagine and then try to conform my life to them. I thought it meant, "Let the highest truths and values guide you." I lined up the loftiest ideals I could find and set out to achieve them. Of paramount importance during those formative years was the need to make my parents proud of me not necessarily what would make me be proud of myself. Somehow I got the idea that my life had to speak good to my parents only. The results were admirable, often laughable, and sometimes grotesque but they managed to build a good foundation for my character.

In my teens the maxim, "Let your life speak," retained the meaning of my early youth and added on to it what my peers would applaud. Things like fashion, latest hairstyles, latest music cassetes, reading the latest novels and seeing the latest films. The need to be accepted and belong to a peer group became incorporated into, "Let your life speak." So most of the time what I would do as a teenager wasn't really what deep down in my heart I felt I wanted to do but what my parents and my peers would approve of. But always they were unreal, a distortion of my true self--as must be the case when one lives from the outside in, not the inside out. I had simply found a "noble" way to live my life without taking consideration of what the person that is me wanted.

In my married years the meaning of the maxim , "Let your life speak," added on to it what my husband and his clan would approve and discarded peer dependent values that I had added during my teen years. I was determined to make my marriage work and so followed what the older women in my clan had advised me was the ideal behaviour that was expected from a married woman according to our culture. "Let your life speak," then meant letting my life speak good to my husband and the society. The real person that is me became hidden as I tried to conform to the norms of a Zimbabwean marriage. The results were rarely appreciated and my soul was disturbed, true peace and happiness eluded me and as long as I did things without asking myself what I wanted first I felt suppressed. There may be moments in life when we are so unformed that we need to use society norms and culture like an exoskeleton to keep us going and when doing so doesn't bring us happiness we are bound to revolt. Trying to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail--and may even do great damage

By all appearances, things were going well, but the soul does not put much stock in appearances. Seeking a path more purposeful than accumulating wealth, holding power, winning at competition, or securing a career, I had started to understand that it is indeed possible to live a life other than one's own. Fearful that I was doing just that, I would snap awake in the middle of the night and stare for long hours at the ceiling. My aunt had advised me that a good woman was supposed to tolerate violence from her husband as part of marriage and keep quiet if the husband acted irresponsibly but that was not how I wanted my husband to treat me. True self, when violated, will always resist us, sometimes at great cost, the cost to me was my marriage but I have no regrets.

Today, "Let your life speak" means something else to me, a meaning faithful both to the ambiguity of those words and to the complexity of my own experience. I learnt that before I let my life speak I have to do some soul-searching & know what I want
from life, not what my peers or the society want, or else my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions. My new meaning of, "Let your life speak," came from my realisation that everyone has a life that is different from the "I" of daily consciousness, a life that is trying to live
through the "I" who is its vessel. It takes time and hard experience to sense the difference between the two, to sense that running beneath the surface of the experience I call my life, there is a deeper and truer life waiting to be acknowledged. If I am to let my life speak things I want to hear, things I would gladly tell others, I must also let it speak things I do not want to hear and would never tell anyone else! My life is not only about my strengths and virtues, it is also about my liabilities and my limits, my trespasses and my shadow. An inevitable though often ignored dimension of the quest for "wholeness" is that we must embrace what we dislike or find shameful about ourselves as well as what we are confident and proud of. I do not feel despondent about my mistakes, though I grieve the pain they have sometimes caused others. Our lives are "experiments with truth" and in an experiment, negative results are at least as important as success. I have no idea how I would have learned the truth about myself and my calling without the mistakes I have made.

Listening to what my soul wanted became the key to letting my life speak. The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions. The soul is not responsive to subpoenas or cross-examinations. At best it will stand in the dock only long enough to plead the Fifth Amendment. At worst it will jump bail and never be heard from again. The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and
trustworthy conditions and the onus was on me to create such conditions for my soul.
The soul is like a wild animal, tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious soul we seek. In the many hours of solitude I spent as I tried to use solitude as an antidote to loneliness I managed to make my soul emerge for a time long enough for me to search it for answers about the road that my life had to lead. The result was this pursuit for peace, love and happiness that my blog is all about.