The free soul in motion

There is a certain kind of question that keeps coming up again and again. Not always spoken aloud, but clear in its own way.

Are you this – or that?

I have never really recognized myself in the need to choose a side, nor in the desire to identify with a single category.

I don’t feel at home with labels like “new age.” Nor do I fully belong to any single tradition. Atheism is what I recognize myself in the least.

What I believe in follows no consistent model, but it is true for me. It can contain more than one tone, more than one language, more than one way of understanding the world. And one does not exclude the other. It never has for me. 

Yet it is precisely that which is often expected: that one should choose, refine, explain oneself. As if faith, meaning, and inner life are only valid if they can be placed and are easy to name.

Is that how life works?

Isn’t it strange how strongly either-or seems to be rooted in many people, regardless of their form of belief? As if security requires boundaries. As if meaning is only allowed if it follows a map.

Most of us carry several layers at once, somewhere between what we grew up with and what we are still exploring. Is it then really necessary to be forced to choose between different forms of some immovable, fixed faith? Why isn’t that enough for me?

I who do not believe in order to belong. I who do not belong in order to believe. I who let what carries me be where there is room – without making it an identity.

Perhaps it is precisely that which is unsettling in a world that wants to sort – that someone takes neither a stand nor preaches for one. That someone says, without drama: I am here as I am.

Even as a child, I read books so often, so much, so intensely that my mother had to “throw me out” of my room to be a child and then a teenager “for real.” Since I can think and write, I have written my way through what is happening within and around me to let my thoughts land. To let the inner self breathe.

Is that why my position can be perceived as controversial, without all the “labels”?

What I experience myself is that this is why the need to place oneself feels foreign. Direction exists there and moves - by living and letting things coexist.

So I continue to write - to stay in touch with what is happening.

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