The Genuine in You

A reflection inspired by Howard Thurman

This is a thing Howard Thurman spoke to a group of graduating college students, “if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of the strings that somebody else pulls.”

I tried to ask myself the question: What is the sound of the “genuine in me”? 

Packed with this question, I strolled to the edge of a lookout where the ocean was all I could see. In hand were my pen and a notebook. I scrawled the question on a blank page and waited for an answer. 

What transpired surprised me. Instead of an “answer” to the question, I wrote a poem. But not a poem that was an answer… just a poem. 

The following day I thought to myself, let me try again, in the morning this time, to search for what makes up the “genuine” in me. Perhaps the conundrum is this: I know the sound but I am unsure how to name it. At present, in response to Thurman’s words, I do not spend my days “on the ends of the strings that somebody else pulls.” Instead, those on the ends of such strings are rather easy to identify. Like a mantra, I state over and over that I do not want to live that way… so I don’t. Yet the path is still overgrown and I swing a sharp stick to clear the way because even if the path is hard to find, I hear the sound of the genuine in me with each swipe. 

And yet, I don’t want to live in such a way where I always think, “at least I’m not them.”

In fact, the aim of this practice is to follow the whispering call—what makes you come alive? And like any word whispered, I must lean in close to the sound, feel its breath against my ear. I must still my movements with deliberateness, quell the competing noise, and wait, with my swiping stick at the ready.

Of course, it’d be preferred if the clarity of such a call met me in the undeniable voice of the divine, like walking into an oasis after battling the brush. However, as we know all too well, the sound is more likely to be found in the unhurried trod, and there I’ll perk to the warm resolve that the path I’m on is the very thing that makes me come alive. 

Twisted, and somewhat confusing, I am not in search of a sole destination at which to arrive. 

So I keep walking, and listening, for the sound that makes me come alive is already beating.