Wolves and Fluidity

There’s a beautiful ancient proverb I think about a lot. It’s about these wolves in your head, and how it’s natural for everyone to have thoughts they like and thoughts they don’t like, and that the ones that stick are like the wolf you feed. Maybe you know it?

I’ve been spending a lot of time with those wolves lately, getting to know them and feeding the wrong one a lot of the time, because, hey, it’s a wolf and it seems like you should feed it instead of getting eaten by it.

I’ve also been thinking that maybe there aren’t just these two wolves, the one you should feed and the one you shouldn’t. That maybe there are whole packs of wolves, colonies of wolves, non-endangered thriving populations of wolves. And some of them are kind of mean and some of them are kind of friendly, and some of them are good at art and some of them are good at caring, and some just lie in the sun all day because the sun is wonderful. An ecosystem of mind-wolves.

They all live there and some of them are well-fed, but even the ones that you try not to feed at all never go away completely. And that with so many wolves to choose from, we become fluid. We are everything and anything. We don’t have boundaries. Or at least those boundaries are temporary, because we’ll all be stars again someday. And there is even a wolf who is the master of your childhood dream, whether it’s drawing or firefighting or having an amazing family, and if you keep putting food out long enough, eventually she will come around. And there is a wolf who is well-adjusted and comfortable in the world, and she will, too.

We are always becoming. We are blossoming in every direction. Even when it feels like we’re not.