Whatever I am given in life, whatever I am presented, I ultimately accept it by weaving it into a tapestry of my own understanding of my life. If they comprise of my gifts and fortunes, I easily and even eagerly weave those in. But if they consist of characteristics that I do not like of myself—my defects, my disadvantages, my misfortunes, and traumas, or any things “gone wrong”—they are understandably difficult and painful to weave into my tapestry. It takes a lot of patience, a lot of time, a lot of delicacy to be able to weave them in. It could not be any other way, for each weave in that process feels vulnerable and sensitive to make. But when I do so, they become an equal part of the whole of the integrated design of my tapestry of life.
When it comes to thinking how to integrate my gifts and my fortunes into an understanding of my own life, it is easy for me to breeze through this process mindlessly, hastily weaving them into the tapestry of my meaning-making of it without hesitance. It is immediately satisfying to conceptualize how my gifts and my fortunes can be integrated into a meaning of my life and into a narrative of my life story, but something is lost in that simplicity, and what results is a one-dimensional understanding. There is not much that pushes me to do more with it.
The challenging aspects of my life, on the other hand, naturally force me to have to think much harder and work much more intently in the creative process of weaving them into an understanding of my own life. This often takes much more skill and finesse, a more sophisticated and intricate, painstaking process, to be able to thoughtfully work them in. Having to work within the constraints of difficult conditions is the prerequisite to true creativity in both art and meaning-making of life.
