What’s Real and What’s Role?

Many of us know Bruce Lee as a famously accomplished martial artist turned actor.  Throughout his life, Lee was primarily a thinker, a philosopher and a poet.  He took the learnings from his lifelong curiosity around philosophy, spirituality, psychology and more to inform his approach to martial arts and the way he showed up in all facets of his life.

In a passage from a book compiled from Lee’s writings titled Artist of Life, Lee begins by saying that anxiety is caused by being unsure about the roles we are playing or how we are doing within those roles.  He goes on to state that:

“the meaning of life is that it is to be lived and not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a pattern of systems.” 

What Lee is getting at is that each of us must develop and hold onto our center, who we are at our core, in order to support ourselves fully, roles and all.  If we develop a character that is reliant solely on our roles (which ultimately are informed by the expectations and needs of others), we are stuck in too rigid a system.  We lose our ability to cope freely with the world and have access to all of our inner wisdom and resources.

With a commitment to ourselves to be true, we must know what we most value and need, while embracing the importance of the roles and commitments we take on with conscious awareness.