Although I like the locution, I’m not always quite sure what might be meant by “become what you are” (BTW, I get the phrase from Watts, not Hatfield). To some ears, including some of mine, such phrases smack of circularity, or worse. Then I think of phrases like “the limit, as t approaches 0, of sin(t)/t equals 1”, which makes the same amount of sense as “become what you are”. Somehow (sometimes) the former seems more concrete than the latter. If I believe a man-made bridge will hold my weight as I walk over it, I’m implicitly agreeing with some statements about limits and differentials, right? So somehow I need to bridge that understanding of the ‘limit’ concept over into the ‘becoming’ concept.
There seems to be an irreconcilable divide between how I see myself and how others see me. I care mostly about who I am and what I can become, and little about what I’ve done or what I can do. Most others take the opposite weighting. This is, I think, as it should be. But it’s good to recognize the fact and make use of it in order to choose my priorities or align my directions with others’. For example, learning about geometry is a better way of becoming who I am than learning about marketing, and that gives a certain lean to my priorities. However, learning a little bit of marketing will let me better put geometry into action in the world, and will help hook me up with people, projects, and tools to learn about the next bit of geometry.
Helping others become what they are is the next most joyous thing in my life after becoming what I am. A friend mentioned today that attending a funeral made him think about the importance of telling people in his life the things he needs to tell them. Along those lines, I think I ought to make sure that I’m doing what I can to help people close to me become what they are. I’d like each of my loved ones to pass from this plane with their last thought of me being that I had helped them achieve their self. More than that, I’d like that to always be their last thought of me.