Virtus #080: Being Comes First
A quiet note on Elio D'Anna's idea that you can only have what you are, and on the harder work of deciding who that is without borrowing it from other people.
I heard a line in a video by Elio D’Anna recently and I have not stopped thinking about it. He said it slowly, almost in pieces, the way a man speaks when he wants the meaning to settle into your chest before you can defend yourself against it.
You can have only what you are.
He called it a principle of economics, which is a strange thing to call it, but he meant economics in the older sense. Not money. The arithmetic of how things actually move in a life. Being comes first, he said. Having is just a manifestation. Having is just being mirrored back in time. The algebra of being. Having is a consequence.
If you respond to yourself, if you answer to yourself (to that Big Questions we all have), then what you have follows.
I sat with that for a few days and I cannot get it out of my head, because almost every move I made in my twenties and most of my thirties was the opposite of this. I tried to have a thing first, and I assumed I would become the corresponding man on the way. I tried to have a successful business so I could become the kind of man who is at peace. I tried to have a relationship so I could become the kind of man who is loved. I tried to have a body so I could become the kind of man who feels at home in his own skin. None of it worked the way I imagined. The having always came late, or in a smaller dose than I expected, or it came and did not feel the way I had been promised it would feel by everyone else.
And the thing nobody told me, or maybe people did tell me and I was not listening, is that the order is reversed. You become first. The being is the cause. The having is the echo.
This sounds like it might be one of those things you read on the back of a yoga studio mug and forget by lunch. I have written it down three times this week and it still has teeth. It has teeth because the implication is uncomfortable. If having is a consequence of being, then I cannot keep waiting for circumstances to deliver me the version of myself I want. I have to be him now. Without the proof. Without the receipt. Without the bank account or the relationship or the body or the title or the calm.
And to do that, I have to know who he is.
That, it turns out, is the hard part. Maybe it is the hardest thing we will ever do for ourselves. Decide what success actually looks like, for you, in your one life, without the guilt and without the pressure that has been quietly accumulating in your chest since you were a teenager. Most of the men I know, including me on bad days, are running someone else’s definition of success. Their father’s. Their father-in-law’s. The man their wife mentions a little too admiringly. The classmate from twelfth grade who keeps showing up on LinkedIn. The voice of a culture that has already decided what a successful life looks like and broadcasts it on every screen they own.
You sit down to think about what you actually want, and within ten seconds you are no longer thinking about what you want. You are thinking about what you should want. The two get mixed up so early in our lives that, by forty, most of us cannot tell them apart without a long quiet stretch and someone we trust to ask us questions.
The work, then, is to peel that apart. Patiently. With permission to get it wrong the first three times.
What does success actually look like, when nobody is watching, when nobody you respect is in the room, when there is no audience and no applause and no possibility of getting an emoji thumbs-up for it. What does an honest day feel like in your body. What does an honest week feel like. What does a life you are not embarrassed by, on a Sunday evening, alone with your own thoughts, look like.
Most people never get to answer those questions because they never sit still long enough to be asked.
When you do answer them, the answer almost never matches the picture you have been carrying around. It is smaller in some ways and bigger in others. It is quieter. It probably involves fewer people but better ones. It probably involves less money than you assumed but more freedom in how you use the money you do have. It probably involves more boredom, which sounds bad until you realize that boredom is one of the under-rated nutrients of an actual human life.
And once you have something close to that picture, the next move is to be him. Not aspire to be him. Not write him into a journal. Not put him on a vision board. Be him. Today. Even if your circumstances do not match yet. Especially if your circumstances do not match yet.
I am, I am, I am.
Not I wish I were. Not I would like to be. Not someday. I am.
This is where I get stuck, and I will tell you the truth about it because I do not want to be more polished about this than I really am. My brain will not let me commit to “I am” without first knowing how the new version of me is going to feel and what he will do on Tuesday afternoon and how he will pay the bills and how he will respond when the old story tries to come back. My brain wants the whole map before it allows the first step. It wants to test-drive the new identity in private before it agrees to wear it in public.
That is, I think, the universal human bug. The brain treats “being” as an outcome that needs evidence, when in fact “being” is the seed that grows the evidence. It is backwards. We are wired backwards.
The only thing I have found that helps is to act, in some small way, as the man I want to be, before I have any reason to believe I am him. A man who is calm sits down and breathes for a minute when the email lands. A man who is honest writes the awkward sentence in the message instead of the safe one. A man who is creative makes the thing on a Tuesday morning before the doubt has woken up yet. A man who keeps his word answers the text he has been avoiding, with no preamble. None of these acts produce a feeling first. The feeling arrives later, sometimes much later, and it arrives because the action came first. Being is verb-shaped. It is not a state you wait inside. It is a stance you take.
And then, slowly, the having begins to drift toward you. Not because the universe owed you anything. Because the version of you that took those actions is, by definition, in different rooms, having different conversations, making different decisions. The having is downstream. It cannot be otherwise.
I am writing this for me as much as for you. I keep catching myself at the old game. I keep tilting toward “I will respond to myself once I have proof I am worth responding to.” Which is the inverted move, the move that keeps the loop closed. The honest move is to respond to myself first. To answer my own life. To take my own promises seriously even when no one is checking.
The cost of doing this is that you have to admit, out loud, that you are responsible. Not in a guilt-shaped way. In an arithmetic-shaped way. The being you decide to inhabit is the one you will eventually have. So choose the one you can stand for, the one you would not be embarrassed to be alone with at two in the morning, the one your future grandkids would actually like.
That is the algebra of it. It is not a trick. It is not a shortcut. It is just the order of operations, and most of us have been running the equation in reverse our whole lives.
You can have only what you are.
I do not know the whole shape of who I am yet. I doubt I ever will. But I can answer to him today, in small ways, without waiting for permission. And I keep noticing that on the days I do, the rooms I walk into feel different, the conversations have a different gravity, and the small having starts to show up at the edges of the day, almost shyly, as if to say yes, this is how it works.
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