And tell me, did you fall for a shooting star?
One without a permanent scar?
And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself?
— from ‘Drops of Jupiter’, a 2001 hit by Train, written by Pat Monahan, Rob Hotchkiss, Charlie Colin, Scott Underwood & Jimmy Stafford.
It might seem glaringly obvious that you can’t find yourself, unless you actually look for yourself. The two verbs go hand-in-hand. Looking and finding. And as we all know, you always find the thing in the very last place you look.
A person much smarter than myself once wrote: “Seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you.”
Actually, what he wrote was: ζητεῖτε, καὶ εὑρήσετε; κρούετε, καὶ ἀνοιγήσεται ὑμῖν. But we know what he meant.
The trick to successful “looking” is to look in the right place — and in the same sense, any knocking you do, needs to be done on the right door. Knocking on the wrong door will just get you dirty looks, or worse, from some guy who was trying to take a nap.
Looking for your car keys (and hopefully, finding them) is a very different process from looking for yourself. There are probably only a half dozen places where you possibly left your car keys, including in the ignition. (Always the last place I look.)
But if you’re looking for yourself… where should you start looking? (Hint: not in the ignition.)
When I was a young boy, I never thought about “looking for myself”. I knew very well where I was. Inside my clothes.
But as I got older, the people around me started talking about “finding themselves.” This naturally confused me at first, because I could see them sitting on the carpet next to me, passing the joint. (Obviously, this was before we looked for, and found, furniture.)
As “finding yourself” became more popular among my friends, it seemed most of them thought the best place to look was in self-help books. Back in those days, the resources were more limited than nowadays. We had Dale Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, which wasn’t really about finding yourself, but more about finding other people whom you could fool into being your friends.
Norman Vincent Peale’s book, The Power of Positive Thinking, focused mainly on increasing your personal wealth, something you can probably do without ever finding yourself. We have to concede, however, that positive thinking can produce positive results, because when you eventually find yourself, the self you find will be a wealthier self.
When I was young, the popular book that seemed to offer the best advice on finding yourself was The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda. Unfortunately, we learned afterwards that the book was a work of fiction, and Don Juan probably didn’t even exist. Just as well, because most of us didn’t have access to peyote.
When I got married, I sort of gave up on the idea of finding myself. I had found a wife, and figured that was the next best thing.
Then the kids came along, and other types of looking, and finding, became more important. For example, I became darn good at finding stray pieces of Legos. (It helps to be barefoot.)
Soon enough, the kids were grown — time flies when you’re raising kids — and the next chore was finding the money for college tuition. Once you find college tuition, it’s usually time to get divorced, because the kids were really the only thing keeping you together.
After the divorce, you briefly think about finding a different wife, and when that doesn’t pan out, you finally realize that — through all of life’s ups and downs — you were looking for yourself all along. Just looking in the wrong places. (Like I said about the ignition.)
Which brings us to the great Indian thinker Mahatma Gandhi, who spent much of his life spinning cotton yarn in his living room, thinking.
Gandhi also appears on the $100 bill in India. We don’t have philosophers on our money here in the U.S. and that might help explain the difficulty we Americans have in finding ourselves.
I came across a meme last week, insinuating that Gandhi once said, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
That seems, to me, like two diametrically opposed intentions. To “find yourself” by “losing yourself”.
I have never once found my car keys by losing them.
However, Gandhi shows up in memes, and on the $100 bill… and I don’t. So maybe he was making a valid point.
But as I mentioned before, you always find the thing in the very last place you look.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.