Finding Your Place

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.”

~William Shakespeare, “As You Like It”

As Shakespeare points out, there are seven stages in our lives. We begin as babies, moved to the stage where we are winding schoolboys (or schoolgirls. Shakespeare only spoke of schoolboys), become lovers, soldiers, justices, begin the aging process and then exit the stage.

In Buddhism, the stages of life are spoken of as birth, aging, sickness, and death.

But that doesn’t deal with the question of finding “your place.”

“Your place” is defined differently by different people.

A lovely meme described finding your place as, “I don’t think it’s a path about finding who you are. I think it’s about finding a place where you can be who you are.”

Then unattributed quote speaks to the idea that environments win. Thus if we go into environments where we have to sacrifice ourselves to conform to someone else’s expectation of how we should be, that is not our place.