the real me

I don't work. By this I mean I don't do things I don't want to do for other people or organizations in return for money. I did that for 42 years and now I'm done with it. A person that spends the bulk of his life working will have his true personality subdued. During our work life we're pressed into the mold of corporate culture and our true selves are shaped along social convention. So, when the day of retirement finally arrives (and there are those who are never able to retire), and the constraints of the world upon our selves are relaxed, our souls unfold like a sponge that's been compressed and then released. It's been two years since the day of my retirement and I'm still waiting to see what will blossom. It seems that working has changed me. Some of the things that I had planned to do no longer hold an attraction for me; and some of the talents that I seem to have possessed in my youth have faded. So, instead of the real me just popping out like a jack-in-the box, it looks like I'm going to have to go into my psyche and drag me out.

Here's a quote from Alan Watts:

"The conventional 'self' or 'person' is composed mainly of a history consisting of selected memories, and beginning from the moment of parturition. According to convention I am not simply what I am doing now. I am also what I have done, and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the real 'me' than what I am at this moment, for what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future, and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than what what actually is.

quoted from, Three: The Way Of Zen