But who knows what a blind child sees when looking at blossoms. Who knows what anyone sees from the privacy of their own blindness. And make no mistake, each of us is blind in a particular way as each of us has a unique sense of sight. In effect, each of our fears blinds us to a particular depth. If we fear heights, we are blind to the humility vast perspectives bring. If we fear spiders, we are blind to the splendor and danger of webs. If we fear small spaces, we are blind to the secrets of sudden solitude. If we fear passion and involvement, we are blind to the comfort of faith and the awareness of the Whole. If we fear change, we are blind to the mystery of life. If we fear death, we are blind to the majesty of the unknown. And since to fear something is thoroughly human, to be blind is unavoidable. It’s something we keep struggling to overcome.

When we can slow down and move through our fear, we rejoin the elemental force that resides in everything and are empowered with a sense of original energy that reveals our gift. Such energy enabled a poor, blind, orphaned teenager to find his gift and live his own life. I’m referring to Ray Charles who remarks:

I was born with music inside me. That’s the only explanation I know . . . Music was one of my parts. Like my blood. It was a force already with me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me—like food or water. Music is nothing separate from me . . . You’d have to remove the music surgically.

Regardless of the form this energy takes, we constantly struggle whether to honor the great flow of the Universe that empowers our very being or to fulfill our roles as prescribed by others. And while managing both can be done with a rare combination of skill and circumstance, more often, the effort to live what is expected blocks the flow of being we seek. After going deaf in 1792, the Spanish painter Francisco Goya understood this:

To allow his genius to become apparent to himself it was necessary that he should dare to give up aiming to please [Andre Malraux].

The mystic Thomas Merton terms this the quest for integrity:

Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the person or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives.