A Whisper of Wholeness
Labels are sticky business ... no matter if you are applying or wearing them. They can get you both really stuck and drifting away from integrity ... at the same time.
You know the feeling. A price tag on a gift you’re about to wrap. You pick at the corner with a fingernail. It tears. Half comes off and half stays behind, along with that gummy film that grabs every bit of lint in the room. In the most inconvenient place on the gift. At the most inconvenient time. You scrub. You scrape. It just gets messier. Labels are like that. Some are handed to us early. The shy one. The difficult one. The responsible one. Others we apply ourselves, to people we’ve barely met, in the space of a single glance. It only takes a second. Yet removing one can take years … and even then, the residue can linger.
Here is what makes a label so sticky. It names one part yet applies it to the whole. And once it’s on, it keeps speaking. Quietly. The shy one holds back a little more. The difficult one stops expecting to be heard. Without noticing, we begin living toward the label instead of from our core. Stuck to its message … while drifting from who we truly are. All at the same time. And it’s no different when we’re the ones applying them. Each encounter confirms the label we gave. Each confirmation leaves another layer of judgment. Stuck seeing only the label … while drifting further from the person standing right in front of us. And from ourselves. Maybe the invitation isn’t to scrape harder. Maybe it’s simply to notice the label is there and then look again for what it has been covering all along. Wholeness. Still waiting to be discovered.
For further reflection
What is one label I have worn, or applied, for so long that I’ve stopped noticing it’s even there?