When Does Being Become Becoming?

A question arose while I was sitting quietly this morning:

I didn’t have an answer.

The question simply appeared.

But it stayed with me.

A child enters the world without a résumé, designation, qualification, achievement, reputation or philosophy.

Then life begins to accumulate.

We learn.

We compare.

We admire.

We imitate.

We develop ambitions.

We discover people we want to become like.

We hear what success should look like.

Eventually, many of us begin constructing versions of ourselves somewhere in the future.

There is nothing inherently wrong with becoming.

A child must learn. A human being can develop skills, knowledge and capability throughout life. Curiosity can take us far beyond where we started.

So the question that interests me is not:

Why do we want to become something?

It is something subtler.

At what point does:

“I am.”

begin to be accompanied by:

“I should become.”

And even that may not be the real question.

Perhaps there is a difference between growth and the feeling that who I am now is somehow insufficient.

I can want to become a better speaker.

A better leader.

A better parent.

A better engineer.

A better human being.

But what is actually moving underneath that desire?

I don’t know.

And this creates another question.

Does becoming require rejecting being?

Can I completely accept what I am now and still passionately develop what I could become?

Can ambition exist without inadequacy?

Can improvement happen without self-rejection?

Can I learn from another human being without trying to become that human being?

This brings me to perhaps the strangest part of the question.

At some point, a human being may ask:

And then go searching for the answer in another human being’s book.

There is nothing wrong with reading that book.

Someone else’s experience may illuminate something we have never noticed.

But can another person actually tell me who I am?

Or can they only give me another direction in which to look?

I still don’t have an answer.

Perhaps I don’t need one yet.

For now, I am left with something much simpler to observe.

Whenever the thought appears—

what was present immediately before it?

Curiosity?

Fear?

Comparison?

Love?

Possibility?

A sense of inadequacy?

Something else entirely?

Maybe becoming is one of the most natural movements of human life.

But I am curious about the moment before it.

And does one really have to disappear for the other to begin?