THE GREAT PRETENDERS - A MEDITATIVE DRIFT

Pretentiousness is a kind of quiet disease, a subtle ache of becoming what we are not.

- MIKE GEORGE

The body is the doorway; the being is the one who walks through.

A reaching. A stretching. A glimmering show built on the trembling fear that the simple truth underneath might not be enough. And somewhere inside, beneath all the layers of display, a faint awareness whispers: this is not quite me. And even that whisper is often ignored.

Some of us slip into the disguise of what we do. We weave our identity from titles, roles, competencies - threads of activity that we imagine form a self. But when the work stops, the scaffolding trembles. Change feels like a small death, and retirement becomes an empty horizon. Yet the silence keeps saying: you are not the doing.

Some of us cling to what we look like. The mirror becomes a verdict, and the image becomes a story we keep rewriting. We polish, adjust, correct, hoping the reflection will finally approve. But the reflection is only light. You are not the light's opinion.