COLIN WILSON REFERS TO THIS continuous personality expansion of reinventing yourself as “spiritual metamorphosis.”
In fact, Wilson says, in his Anatomy of Human Greatness, “the refusal to keep repeating the act of spiritual metamorphosis is the reason that all great artists cease to develop.”
Like Picasso, who regressed into immaturity in his later paintings. Like Elvis Presley, who took his journey backward. Like Dylan Thomas, who crawled back into the womb of alcohol. Like Kurt Cobain, who tried to match heroin, his living death, with suicide, the more permanent form of the same thing.
Behind the death mask of human personality there is a life force dying to express itself and be happy. It’s the child’s natural love of life.
Amy Tan’s powerful novel The Joy Luck Club was based on a real-life group of women. Her mother’s friends used to get together each month to play mah-jongg. “The Joy Luck Club” was what they called their group. The women knew they needed joy and excitement in their lives, and they knew they were in charge of creating it. So they built it into their routine in the form of a fun and unpredictable game. They made their own joy and luck happen.
In our teen years, we unconsciously make a death mask to wear. It is shaped from our embarrassments, real and imagined. Then we call the mask our personality.
The mask hides the love of life we had as children. That love is all we had, and now we’ve hidden it, and covered it up so the air can’t get in. Personalities are not fun, vibrant things; they are what we crawl inside of to die.
Freedom from this death mask is found in enthusiasm and excitement. It is found in spirited self-creation, inspired by a project, a purpose, or a game we have decided is worth winning. (In games we find our lost love of life.)
If we will become aware of the possibilities of ever-expanding self-invention, we can then look to express a self that surprises us a little more each time, a self not yet fully realized or habituated, like Oprah in The Color Purple or Oprah running the marathon in the rain.
My friend Kate is a good example of reinventing yourself. When I first met her, there were a lot of things she was afraid to do, including being assertive and speaking in a public setting. Most people would have just written that off as a part of their personality. “I’m shy in public,” they would say, endearing themselves to their own weakness. But Kate has been a proponent of personality-busting from the moment she found out that she could do it.
Today, she is winning awards at Dale Carnegie for her improvisational speaking. Most people never would have signed up to learn how to do what they feared doing. Kate was committed to reinventing herself upward every chance she got. She now works out in a gym every day simply because she didn’t like “who she was” physically. So she changed who she was. It is the greatest-kept secret of modern life that we can do that.
We don’t have to do it in huge ways, either. Sometimes, the smaller the better. Tiny personality changes here and there inspire growth in us constantly. Inspiration leads to enthusiasm.
When Emerson said, “Nothing great was ever created without enthusiasm,” he wasn’t just talking about works of art, he was talking about individual lives. No one creates a great life without reconnecting to the enthusiasm experienced in childhood.
And anyone can make that connection. Any time. It has nothing to do with age. (In fact, people often use the aging process as a cover story to hide their avoidance of this effort.) It has nothing to do with circumstance. And it does not depend on other people. The spirit is in us already. It is the love behind the mask.