We Are Always Becoming
We often speak of becoming as though it belongs to the future.
Who will I become?
What will my life become?
But becoming is not something that begins when we decide to change our lives.
It is already happening.
We are changed by what we experience, by the people we encounter, by what we love and lose, by what we learn, by the choices we make, and sometimes by circumstances we never would have chosen.
Much of this happens so gradually that we barely notice it. We may live in the same home, remain in the same relationship, continue doing familiar work—and still be changing in ways we do not yet recognize.
At other times, transformation makes becoming unmistakable.
Something ends. Something begins. A role we have inhabited no longer fits or is no longer available to us. We enter a relationship, discover an unexpected interest, experience a loss, encounter an idea, or find ourselves standing at the edge of circumstances we could not have anticipated.
We may ask:
Who am I now?
What happens next?
And the answer may not yet exist.
The mind can imagine the future only from what it already knows. Becoming can bring forth what we could not have imagined.
This does not mean that we cannot make plans or choose directions. We can.
But some of the most consequential developments in our lives emerge through encounters we could not have planned because the people, experiences, knowledge, capacities, and circumstances that make them possible have not yet entered our lives.
We meet them by living.
And as we do, something happens.
What we experience becomes part of us. What we learn changes what we can perceive. What we have survived changes what we can hold. What we practice becomes capacity. What we create enters the world and begins affecting things beyond ourselves.
What has become changes what can become.
Perhaps, then, becoming is not primarily about deciding who we should be next.
Perhaps it begins by noticing what is already happening.
What is becoming possible from who you have become up to now?
What is beginning to unfold for you?
What is beginning to emerge from you?
What is beginning to radiate from you?
You don’t have to name it.
You don’t have to know where it is going.
For now, simply notice what is there.
Sunday at 4:00
Nearly two years after my divorce was final, my new relationship with Blue was followed by a custody case brought by the boys’ father, who was then in law school. The boys were five, four, and sixteen months old.
It was 1972.
He had a $10,000 lawyer—the same attorney John Lennon and Yoko Ono had used in her custody case. I had a $250 lawyer.
The case itself was a travesty. A private detective gave paid testimony that he had seen Blue and me selling drugs in a restaurant at the exact time we were meeting with five local ministers about Who Cares Crisis Center, where we volunteered. I was never allowed to call a single witness.
The judge was leaving the next morning for a fishing trip off the coast of Chile. Time had run out. He ended the case.
My ex-husband won custody.
I could not see or contact my children during the week. I had them only from 10 a.m. Saturday until 4 p.m. Sunday.
Their father was working full-time for a NASA subcontractor and attending law school at night, so during most of each week they were cared for by a maid. My youngest did not talk until he was two and a half.
I was devastated.
For months, there was no new future waiting for me. There was simply the loss of the life I had known.
Every Sunday at four, I returned my children and watched them go back into a life from which I was largely excluded.
I painted that experience during those months. In the painting, the boys and their father are outside the car, surrounded by light and color. I am inside, in darkness, watching through the window. Painting it gave me a way to externalize an experience I could not yet resolve.
Gradually, another reality became apparent.
Blue and I had become the weekend parents—the play parents—with none of the weekday responsibilities that had previously organized my life. I had been a full-time, stay-at-home mother. That identity had not merely changed. It had been stripped away.
I needed to discover who I was going to be now.
I could not possibly have imagined the answer.
During the seven years before my two younger boys eventually returned to live with us, as well as Blue’s son who was about the same age, the unwanted emptiness in my life gradually became space. I began exploring things that interested me. I learned. I volunteered. I met people. Blue and I had a daughter. One experience led to another.
Again and again, I would enter something because I was interested in it, learn enough to become useful, and then find that when circumstances changed or a position became vacant, I was standing there—knowledgeable and prepared for something I had never planned to do.
Each new context changed me. Each role required me to learn and inhabit another way of being. And what I became in each experience prepared me for possibilities I could not yet see.
None of this made losing my children a good thing.
I would never have chosen the experience that opened that space in my life.
But I can see now that the life I subsequently lived could not have unfolded in the same way without it.
I did not know who I was becoming.
I became by living what came next.
I could not have imagined the forms my life would eventually take.
I would become a therapist, a professor and graduate-program chair, a minister, an international trainer, and an author. None of those identities existed as a plan that morning in 1972.
Most entered my life because I became interested in something, stepped toward it, learned, participated, and discovered that each experience had prepared me for another I had also never anticipated.
The titles are not the point. They are simply markers of how far becoming can carry us beyond what we are presently able to imagine.
Looking backward, I can see continuity where I once experienced only a succession of unexpected opportunities.
The settings changed. The roles changed.
But again and again, I found myself drawn toward the processes by which people encounter change, transformation, and becoming.
I had learned to listen and follow, and allow becoming to happen as I developed trust in my own unfolding life path, my becoming.
Practice: Listen and Follow
Becoming does not always announce where it is going.
Sometimes it begins as an interest that keeps returning, a question that will not quite leave us alone, a person or idea we feel drawn toward, something we want to learn, or a possibility we cannot yet explain.
We do not have to know what it means.
We can simply listen.
Notice what seems alive for you now.
What are you curious about?
What keeps attracting your attention?
What are you finding yourself wanting to understand, explore, create, experience, or offer?
What is beginning to unfold from who you have already become?
Don’t try to name the person you are becoming. No labels. Just description.
Then, if something has enough life in it, follow it a little.
Read the book. Have the conversation. Visit the place. Make the phone call. Try the class. Write the first paragraph. Volunteer. Ask the question.
Not because you know where it will lead.
Simply because following brings you into relationship with something that listening has helped you notice.
Then listen again.
The encounter may deepen your interest. It may change it. It may lead somewhere entirely unexpected. Or it may tell you that there is nothing more for you there.
All of that is information.
Becoming does not require us to follow every impulse or abandon responsibilities, boundaries, or practical judgment. It asks only that we remain attentive enough to notice when something new may be trying to enter our lives.
Listen for what is alive.
Follow far enough to encounter what is there.
Let the encounter inform what comes next.
Then listen again.
A Seed to Carry With You
You do not have to know who you are becoming.
You may only need to notice what is alive in you now—and be willing to follow it far enough to discover what it has to show you.
What you encounter will become part of who you are.
And who you become will change what becomes possible next.
Listen and follow.
The path becomes visible by being walked.
