If you do it right, you will suffer many deaths in your lifetime. And if you do it right, each one will bring you closer to your real self. Believe it or not, everything that is happening in your life is working to bring about these little deaths, which will peel back the layers of your false self and allow the truest form of your being to emerge. Really your “false self” is just all the forms of you that existed before this and which must be shed, like a snake repeatedly sloughing off its skin. Other people may not even notice how you have changed, but you will feel like a new person, freshly alive in a new way (born again). It’s just the newest form of you – and you are destined to do it again.

You can only be what you are. That is why, when you are living life and being creative, you must hone in on what feels just right. That process of discerning is very important. Tuning in to what is inside you is not just paying attention to your inner thoughts and feelings and your inner voice; it is getting ahold of that inner archetype that is trying to come out – like David from the marble. When a musician or an artist sits down to her work, there is a line or a note that seems like just the right one, which means there are many more lines and notes that are not the right ones. The process of creating is tuning in to all the right notes and creating a work of art, a melody, a masterpiece that feels just right. Others may look at it and wonder why you did it this or that way and wonder why not this other way, but what they think doesn’t matter.

It’s that way when I write: there is a word or wording that seems just right, and a way to say it that might be how another would’ve said it, but doesn’t hit quite the same way. It is that way with your life. You are building something no one else is building. They are not you. And they don’t know about what is inside you – that is, until you show them. And even when you show them, there is more molting and revealing to come. Growing older is just whittling yourself down to nothing, eventually. You must become less, not more.

We have trouble with this because we refuse to or we’re afraid to practice death. It doesn’t feel good. It feels like we will no longer exist. It’s not that; it’s just that you will no longer exist in the way you have existed up until now. That is painful. And the older you get, the less and less you will be, until you get to your final and freeing death. That is when you will let go of all you are all at once and experience the Big Life that you have been working toward all along. Everything you have become will be whisked away at that time, and it will be glory.

“And so long as you do not know that to die is to become, you are just a wretched visitor on this dark earth.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe