Master or Slave?

Recently, a close friend said to me, “It seems like you’re just waiting for someone to tell you what to do.”

Her statement echoes a string of thoughts that I had been dealing with for a while now. The main thrust of the issue falls neatly, perhaps a bit too neatly, into a simple dichotomy: Am I a leader or a follower?

The question itself is somewhat flawed because no one is strictly and unanimously a leader or a follower in all aspects of their life. A general may lead an army while kneeling towards his wife. A team captain may command her teammates, while submitting to her teachers. A person may submit to their spouse when it comes to food preferences while asserting herself pointedly when it comes to religion. In essence, our life is the negotiation of concentric dimensions that constantly overlap like a sort of Venn-diagram of life at large.

However, when the issue at hand is over the direction of one’s life, then the issue becomes more pressing and forces us to take a harder line and make a clearer distinction. Our future is the most important thing we possess: if there is any realm of life where we should strive to be a leader, this is it. However, not everyone is born or raised to be a leader. Those of us with a natural proclivity towards following who try against their will to lead, create a dissonance within themselves: a conflict between what they are and what they would like to be.

But where does this “natural proclivity” come from? Is it that we are born either timorous or adventurous? Or is it that we are raised to be either obsequious or autonomous? And does free-will ever enter the picture with this question? Should we embrace our dispositions of character? Or should we fight the good fight and try to wrestle control into our hands? Is our identity ours to create? Or is it a preset outline that we have to “fill in/flesh out”? Who am I and where am I going?

Lately, I’ve been running away from the idea that I am (un)naturally a follower. I always believed that I was a natural leader by nature and that “society” was holding me back. If it wasn’t my parents, then it was my school, or my friends, or my culture, that was responsible for tying me down and preventing me from spreading my wings. But now I’ve reached a point in my life where these external impositions have by and large disappeared as serious concerns. I am done with school. I have a job. I don’t have to listen to my parents. Etc… And yet I feel as trapped and as helpless as I did when I was surrounded by those boundaries.

Asserting his or her own power, the master commands their life and is a creative force much like an artist. Demurely, the slave fawns over the piece of art created and stands back with restraint as a witness.

It is true that my natural tendency is to fall in line and obey the common trend. My disposition is that of a sedated servant. But if I am to remain faithful to my whole being, then I must also remain faithful to that glimmer of defiance within me. I may never be able to change the fact that I am a slave and a follower. So, I must change who and what I pledge my allegiance to. Rather than kneel under the weight of my parents, my society, and my culture, I must become the servant of my passions.  

But until these words becomes acts, then it all remains to be mere sophistry rather than artistry.