There is a scene in Akeelah and the Bee that I think about more than I should.
Akeelah is eleven years old, sitting in Dr. Larabee's office. She is from a neighborhood that has told her, in a thousand small ways, that she is not for the big stage. He points to a passage on the wall and tells her to read it out loud. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
I first watched that movie because I was the kind of kid who liked words. Growing up in Catbalogan, I read the dictionary. I read encyclopedias. Not because anyone asked me to. Just because they were there, and I liked them. So when I saw a movie about a girl who was good at spelling and didn't know yet how good she was, something in me leaned in. I liked it. I didn't fully understand it. Not for years.
The deeper meaning of that scene didn't land on me until much later. I think I was in my thirties before the words started to mean anything beyond a nice line. Now, in my forties, I am finally reading the book the passage came from — Marianne Williamson's A Return to Love. I am doing the slow work of trying to actually internalize it, instead of just admiring it.
The Quote, And Who Didn't Say It
The full passage goes like this:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
I should mention something most people get wrong about this passage. It is constantly attributed to Nelson Mandela's 1994 inaugural address. He never said it. Williamson wrote it. I think the misattribution is its own little lesson. It says something about us that we'd rather hand a passage like this to a great man than carry it ourselves. As if a line about our own light only counts when it comes from someone bigger.
The Book
A Return to Love came out in 1992. Williamson wrote it as a kind of distilled reflection on a much denser spiritual text called A Course in Miracles. Her argument, the one she returns to in every chapter, is simple and uncomfortable.
Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned. The work of a life is unlearning the fear and remembering the love.
She says playing small is not humility. It is a refusal of responsibility. When we hide so other people won't feel uncomfortable, we call it being polite, but underneath it is just cowardice. We do it because owning our gifts is more dangerous than denying them. Hiding feels safe. Showing up does not.
The famous passage sits in her chapter called Work. That is not an accident. She is saying our calling — what we do with our days, how we earn our living, how we build something — is one of the main places where we are asked to either shine or shrink.
Both Directions
I want to be honest. I don't know that I can give you a single big moment when I played small. I think playing small is a human thing. It creeps up on me sometimes when I worry that my success will overshadow someone else's. And — this is the harder one to admit — it creeps up on me when I worry that someone else's success will overshadow mine. Both directions. Both small.
The trap underneath both is comparison. And the way out is not to fix yourself by some date, because there isn't a finish line. We are never truly self-improved. We are always in a process of becoming.
I find that comforting. It means kindness toward yourself is part of the work, not a break from it.
The Successful Person's Version Of Playing Small
Here is where I have to be more honest still.
I have a strong work ethic. I believe I can achieve most things I set my mind to. I don't think there are many people who can outwork me. So my version of playing small does not look like cowering. It looks like control.
It is the need to do everything myself.
I know — intellectually, completely — that nothing of great value is built alone. I know it. I can quote it. But knowing a thing and believing it in your soul are two different things. My belief isn't truly there yet, and I can feel the gap. The Williamson passage stays with me because I think we are meant to do great things, and I can also feel how my own limiting beliefs keep cutting the size of what I think is possible.
I am still trying to get to the next level. And the level I am at right now — running the homes, growing the team, sitting with families during the hardest weeks of their lives — I could not have imagined ten years ago. So even as I name where I am playing small, I have evidence that breaking through is possible. Once you cross a level you couldn't picture, you don't go back.
Light Is A Web
When I think about whose light gave me permission to shine, I cannot land on one person. I tried. It feels almost wrong to try.
I think of Mama, who raised me. I think of Papa. I think of my grandmother, my Lola Lupe — Guadalupe — beside whom I slept for the first seven years of my life in Samar, and who taught me how to pray. I think of teachers and friends from university in Cebu. I think of the mentors who took my calls when there was no good reason for them to. I think of the caregivers at Golden Pines who do the hard, daily, sacred work of caring for someone else's parent. I think of the residents themselves, who teach me more than I have any right to expect. I think of business partners and colleagues across twenty years.
To name only one of them as the source of my light would be to lie about how any of us ever get anywhere. Light is a web. It is an inheritance that arrives in pieces, from many hands, over many years. The honest response is gratitude, not attribution.
A Journal With The Door Open
I have always loved to write. I just haven't had the time. My schedule has been hectic for most of my adult life. Starting this blog was, in a way, me giving myself permission to come back to something I missed.
But I want to be clear about what this is. This blog is not a performance. It is a journal I have left the door open on. I write here mostly for myself — to think, to make sense of things, to leave a record of who I was at this stage that I can come back to later. I don't really track who reads. I try to write well, but I try not to think too much about it. Stream of thought, mostly. Words that I hope, in the long run, help me become more of the man I am trying to be.
A life of meaning is always at the back of my mind. I have come to believe that a life of meaning can only be had if we truly shine the way we are meant to shine.
The One Hand
Our culture is confused about greatness. We have decided greatness is scale — millions of followers, millions of dollars, viral reach. I have been around enough to know that is not it.
I have held the hand of a dying person. I have done it more than once. Being the last person to hold someone's hand at the end of their life is as big a mission as it gets. That honor — I do not take it lightly. And I try to instill in our caregivers and our staff that it is, in fact, the work. To bring light to a senior's last days. To bring light to their family. To meet a person at the end and say, with your presence: you are not alone.
What good is a light that reaches the world if it cannot reach the one person in front of you? Williamson's passage says our presence liberates others. She does not say our platform does. She says our presence.
So that is what I am trying to give permission for. To anyone I get the pleasure of crossing paths with — caregivers, staff, family, residents, colleagues, the few people who read this blog, the people I have never met — I want to give them the energy that says: you are allowed. Make a difference for one person. Celebrate someone today. Your light is not too much. It is exactly enough.
Most of humanity, if you look closely, has already been given permission. Their light is already shining. We just do not always see it. Part of the work is learning to see it, and to say so.
I don't think we were meant to die without giving all of ourselves and sharing our own light with the world.
That is what I am trying to do. Slowly. Imperfectly. One hand at a time.
