The Path

I wanted only to try to live my life in accord with the promptings which came from my true self.
Why was that so very difficult?
Herman Hesse, Demian

Yesterday, I came across these words, written in my high school English notebook twenty-five years ago. I had jotted down these lines from the preface to Herman Hesse's Demian, because they had special meaning to my struggling teeanage mind...for obvious reasons. The quote didn't reflect my life, though. Not for a very long time. I didn't want "to live my life in accord with the promptings which came from my true self." Far from it. I wanted to flee from those promptings. And flee I did. First to religion. Then to marriage. Then into the dark recesses of my mind where TRUE SELF barely had air to breathe. But every once in awhile, I would crack open the box, punch a few holes to let myself...my self, get some oxygen. And it survived somehow, a bit twisted and disfigured from malnourishment. But alive. And whole. And now overjoyed to breathe the air and walk in the daylight.