You Are What You Share

You are what you share. Sharing affirms and ushers you into the present, something we need to enter constantly. It is easy to get lost in yesterday’s memories or tomorrow hopes. Yet all that is, is right here and now. But you must risk sharing yourself with others to make accessible the nourishing treasure-trove of love, hidden until moments of sharing, of mutual life. Only shared love is fulfilled love.

What we share determines the height, depth and breadth of our daily life. Sharing unfolds only in the present, in the now. It fills our present as air fills a room; indeed, sharing grants to the soul something akin to and as essential to the body as, oxygen. Sharing is food for the common life, the life which is love’s ever-fixed goal.
If you want a satisfying daily life, you have to share yourself, you have to connect with and be confirmed by, significant others. There’s no substitute for it: meaning and motivation spring from common life. What you have shared with another cannot be taken from you; what you have not shared cannot be redone, relived. Moments of sharing are the true treasures of memory. And each day brings fresh opportunities to reach out and share yourself, your heart and life and love with others.

The mystic Osho wrote a beautiful statement about sharing. It’s entitled “Sharing.” It speaks about the freedom, the joy and power of sharing: “As a flower gives its fragrance to the winds, and the lamp gives its light to the night, and the clouds give their rains to the earth — if you go on sharing, your whole life becomes an immensely beautiful dance of energy. And each day, you will have a thousand and one new births.”

Life is a dance. We are always in motion, within and without; life’s melodies linger and lap at our heels. The dance of sharing energizes. Sharing yourself with others generates psychic energy, which in turn sustains the soul as electricity the home. Those who do not share themselves slowly lose the energy which can only come from sharing love. When I look around, I see faces of fatigue. Many have chosen the silence and isolation which enervates, perhaps due to fear and self-protection, to having been punished rather than praised, wounded rather than rewarded for sharing themselves. Yet the only resolution for loneliness and emptiness, the only healing, comes from sharing. To re-energize, you simply have to share yourself.

You are here not only to give yourself to others, but perhaps even more importantly, you are here to share yourself with others. It is something like the difference between giving away uneaten a meal you have prepared, and actually consuming it with others. Eating is essentially communal; sharing is more mutually satisfying than giving. The risks of sharing may be greater than those of giving, but so are its fruits. As I once wrote:

“Only by sharing can you confirm your own existence. When you share with another, you create a foundation from which you both may transcend this world.
“Sharing is greater than giving. Only when sharing may you look into the eyes of your beloved; only then may you sense the presence of a Spirit whose name we are yet to grasp.

“Only equals share. And in the heart of life you are all equal.

“Love can exist only between equals; it can take root only in the common ground of sharing. And when there is sharing, love shall be present, even if it go unnoticed.”