Create Yourself!
I Know Where This Is. Do You?
The air in the workshop hummed with a quiet potential. Sunlight, thick with floating dust motes, illuminated countless unfinished forms—blocks of marble awaiting a chisel, mounds of clay still soft and yielding, canvases primed but untouched. At the center of it all, standing before a simple potter’s wheel, was Sophia. Her hands, timeless and steady, rested on a lump of wet earth.
A man with a sharp wit in his eyes and the ghost of a smile on his lips entered, dusting stone powder from his coat. It was George. He surveyed the room, his gaze lingering on the raw materials.
“A peculiar place,” George remarked, his voice carrying the warm cadence of a seasoned orator. “Full of everything and nothing, all at once.”
Sophia’s eyes met his, a universe of calm understanding within them. “I know where this is,” she said, her voice like the gentle turning of a page.
George chuckled, a dry, knowing sound. “Ah, but of course, you would. The great question is whether anyone else does when they first arrive. Most come here as explorers, equipped with maps and divining rods, desperately searching for a hidden treasure.”
Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
— George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
“They are convinced there is a finished statue buried inside the marble,” Sophia agreed, her fingers gently pressing into the clay, finding its center. “They believe their life’s work is an excavation, a careful dusting away of debris to reveal a pre-ordained self that has been waiting for them all along.”
“Precisely!” George gestured animatedly, his passion for the idea filling the space between them. “What a tragic miscalculation. To spend one’s days on an archaeological dig of the soul, only to find an artifact. It’s a passive existence. The real business of life isn’t one of discovery; it’s one of deliberate artistry.”
The potter’s wheel began to spin, slowly at first. “The most profound freedom we are given,” Sophia mused, as a cylinder began to rise under her hands, “is the choice of what to build. People fear the blank canvas. They are intimidated by the formless clay because it offers no instructions. It demands their will, their imagination, their courage.”
“It demands that they become the architect, not the tenant,” George added, stepping closer. He picked up a sculptor's chisel, weighing it in his hand. “They don’t understand that every choice is a brushstroke. Every challenge overcome is a mark of the chisel. They think character is a thing you find, like a lost coin. They fail to see that it is a thing you forge—in the fires of your own action and conviction.”
The clay on the wheel was now taking the shape of a simple, elegant vase. Sophia’s touch was both firm and gentle, guiding but not forcing.
“They look for a self,” she said softly, “when they should be engaged in the act of creation itself. The person they are seeking does not exist yet. That person is the outcome, the grand project. They are the sculptor, the clay, and the emerging form, all at once.”
George placed the chisel back on the workbench with a soft click. He looked at the myriad of possibilities around him—the stone, the wood, the paint. A deep satisfaction settled on his face. “Indeed. Life is not a quest to find out who you are. It is the grand opportunity to decide who you will be.”
Sophia’s hands stilled, the wheel slowed to a stop. The vase was complete, simple and unique. It had not existed a moment ago. She looked up from her work, her gaze moving past George, seeming to address someone unseen who had just entered the workshop of infinite potential.
“This is the beginning,” she said, her voice echoing in the quiet room. “I know where this is. Do you?”
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