Being Who You Are and Who You Want to Be

By David B. Bohl | October 25, 2007 | One Response

I have a wonderful post about a wonderful woman I’m familiar with and her love for both New York and her home, Arkansas and how she has a canny knack for balancing the two. I share some tips at the end of the post about how you too can find fulfillment, living the life you want and the life you have.

A wonderful woman I’m familiar with is the absolute essence of New York Society – she’s elegant, educated, thoughtful, a lover of theater, witty, and very conversant in almost every arena, from politics to whether the pay phones should be removed from New York streets. She is the perfect New Yorker in every way – except that she has spent her entire life living in the South. She visits New York often, and she reads the New York Times daily.

People who are just introduced to this astonishing lady don’t realize at first that when she says, “I read in the paper…” she’s not talking about their local metropolitan paper. She is, in fact, speaking of the New York Times, which is “the” paper in her mind.

I find this a little funny that someone who so obviously belongs in Chelsea or SoHo actually resides in Little Rock, Arkansas.

But I also find it interesting that someone who so clearly loves both New York, with its theatre scene, and Arkansas, where she has lived most of her life excluding graduate school, has found a balance between the two.

By living in one area she loves and practicing psychology, a career she loves, she is able to make the best of both worlds. She doesn’t have to give up the green trees and the Arkansas River and the mountains and the natural beauty. Little Rock offers numerous cultural opportunities, including a very good repertory company and an excellent community theatre, a ballet company, a presidential library and a high-quality art museum. She lives in Little Rock, appreciates Little Rock for it is, and loves where she lives, and she’s able to feed her creativity by living the best of both worlds.

And many weekends she flies to New York to catch a show and have a fabulous meal and be a New Yorker for a couple of days. She has not missed any of the major shows in years, and always seems to find great seats for the new shows she wants to see. She enjoys the trip, enjoys the stay, and gets part of who she is from the frequent flights to New York and from reading “the paper” to stay in touch with New York.

This fascinates me because I see this as a very real example of someone being both who they are and who they want to be, and combining those two people into one very successful individual – successful in a career sense, as the best psychologist in her state, and successful in a personal sense, as a happy, fulfilled individual able to spend time doing what she loves in every area of her life, because she knows what she wants and how to get it.

I just want to cheer her on, and then take lessons in finding this kind of fulfillment.

How can you find this kind of fulfillment, living the life you want and the life you have, at the same time?