Self-Building, Love, Humility

By: Steven Stosny

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The self is the ultimate subject. It thinks, perceives, imagines, creates, feels, and identifies. Yet we can see it no more than we can see the brain. We understand it through metaphor, rather than direct observation.

A useful concept for talking about it is sense of self. An impression of the subjective, sense of self is not a mirror reflection of a physical object; rather, it’s the experience of what it’s like to be you.

Self-building is an expansion and deepening of the sense of self. It’s a continuous, fluid process. Human beings are never stagnant; we either grow or deteriorate. In youth, the drive to grow is automatic, though erratic. Later in life, we occasionally need to give it a jump start.

Sometimes we need to recognize deterioration to stimulate growth. That’s what happens in the proverbial mid-life crisis, though it is by no means confined to mid-life. Young lives can veer toward deterioration through drugs, ideological dogma, and, of course, illness. Hospice workers tell of patients who seek to learn on the brink of unconsciousness, while others succumb to deterioration before they arrive at hospice, opting to “go gently into that good night.”

The self-building process accelerates within love relationships. We cannot “know” ourselves without knowing ourselves in love. By the time we enter love relationships, we’ve developed fears and inhibitions about the vulnerability necessary for love to thrive. Overcoming these barriers to loving fully builds a more solid sense of self. Shrinking from them weakens it.

Perhaps the greatest barrier to self-building is the hubris of thinking that the self is already built, thinking we know more than we do or that we’re better than other people. A key characteristic of self-building is humility, knowing that we don’t know, yet seeking to learn.

The essays in this work on self-building, love, and humility do not attempt to objectify the self. On the contrary, they seek to make it more powerfully subjective, to facilitate what it does best: create value and light.