Have you met someone who would tell you about his or her learning journey, about how they have transformed their lives or changed themselves for the better?
Learning is a submission of an individual to another body of knowledge. It hints of our humanity and the lack of knowledge that many of us suffer from.
Yet, once we have learnt and know more than the body of knowledge, in many ways that humility is lost because we have overcome that body of knowledge.
You know what others and what other literature say.
How much a person is driven by their ego... That I many ways it is human nature... And in how hierarchy of needs, we do need a very powerful identity.
Yet that search and establishment of one's own identity, even if it is just about an identity of being second place of someone greater, takes away from that humility to put yourself beneath or at least in equal standing with another (or anyone), whether a body of knowledge, or another person.
And the irony is that even the greatest of leaders had to believe in themselves, more than another, save except a few that saw themselves quite uniquely and graciously outwardly and probably internally saw themselves as a conduit of something greater with almost senseless abandon. But there are many, many others who defy this mold.
In my opinion, do we all have a false humility? Yes.
But in the search of my life, if we want true humility, how can we find it?
Perhaps, there is another way.
The path to humility cannot be one where humility features. It is also one where it takes preparation. Preparation to lose everything and to chase nothing. In my own uncle's words, maybe life is about being a "bum". Not a bum as in a lazy, slothful bum. But a bum that rests waiting.
For a bum is one that is invisible. Like Mr Cellophane.
A bum is one that is deemed useless. Like the homeless.
A bum is one that has no purpose. For he seeks not his own.
A bum is one that is always behind. Never ahead. *laughs
A bum is one that doesn't need validation, because even if he gets it, the validation is that from him comes the waste of the body.
But who would want this? To want something like this, in all logical perspective, would never make sense?
And so, maybe true humility comes from giving up that logic that whatever is good, and even whatever is evil, should never have been known. Giving up the logic that whatever is right, whatever is wrong, was never for us to decide. Giving up the logic, and the learning, that understood creation in our own eyes. Giving up the logic that you are chosen, that you deserve something, that you are special or unique.
Take care, all of us in pursuit of something.
Even if we are chasing God or leading a more righteous life, or overcame the greatest challenge, or chosen to do something great for another, it doesn't make us greater or more saved. Even if we are in the majority or the object of glory.
Humility is not fleeting, but maybe it was never ever there.
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