Roles

Which roles do you fulfil in your life? We don’t speak about the stage, but about the stage of life: maybe you fulfil the role of parent, child, sister or brother, your profession, the helping one, the listener… We are more then the totality of the roles we play, but sometimes, the one underneath all roles, get lost.

Are you pleased with your roles? Can you not play them in a different way, more in accordance with your real “being”? Do you want those roles? Do you want any roles? If you don’t, do you not resist to the unavoidable? Do you realise that all your acts are roles?
Can you put them into perspective and first of all not dramatise them? Don’t you identify yourself with one of your roles? Where is for example the woman behind the mother within you? The man behind the carrier? As well as the reverse: father and carrier woman?

Do you realise that you are playing your role? Do you give yourself the necessary play ground? Is there any playing in your roles?
Do others join the role? Where there is a mother, there is a child. The mother feels responsible for her child, the child is willing to hear the constant steering. As long as the child is young, that’s necessary. But from the moment the child is no child anymore, the danger exists that the role is still played. Are you playing your roles forever or can you adapt them? Or stop them or changing to another role? For example that of mother and daughter changing to a role of friends, with a gradual transition, an evolution?

Look as well underneath the most obvious roles. We take the image of an onion. First you see the outskirt: which are your most apparent roles? Peal your onion and look at the layers hided underneath: which other roles are you playing? Continue pealing and discover new thing about yourself. In this way you get a better self-image. Maybe you discover the role of charmer, seducer, scientific researcher, culture pessimist, the hurt, deaf, collector of memories from your past…

Are those roles in harmony? Or is there a duality between two roles, fighting each other?
And if we continue pealing? Is there a core at the end? What is that core? If we question ourselves: who am I, are we just the small white ball in the centre of the onion. Are we not the whole onion, with the core and all the layers included? In this total onion lays our uniqueness.

© Copyright Johan Framhout 2009