Be(coming) Pure

The power of language. I wasn't aware of how powerful the meaning of a word can be, till I started learning a second language properly. Back home in Germany, I studied English for a couple of years but I was never good at it till I moved overseas 4 years ago. In the beginning, my vocabulary wasn't big. That meant that certain words I didn't know didn't exist in my reality. Sure that the words were written down in some book, but not knowing that, they had no meaning for me. While learning the English language properly, I got curious about what the deeper meaning of some words are and I learned that one word can have a different meaning to different people, because of what a person attaches to the word. Recently while reading the book ‘Welcome Home’, written by an author that took her hijab off at the year of 28, I started to think about what the word pure means. There are certain traditions in different cultures and only by maintaining certain rules, you can stay pure. So purity is something you can only lose. It left me with the impression that being pure means to live in the absence of something, like not showing hair or not having sex before marriage. Being pure is associated with being good and free from sin. I know of many people that would live a life in sin if purity would be defined that way. But they seem to be very happy, they seem to feel fulfilled, they enjoyed themselves a lot and they do what brings them joy. They are successful even though they do all these “wrong” things that would give them the label that they are not pure.

So I started asking myself: Am I or anyone else less pure, than someone that for example is waiting to have sex till marriage? What does that word actually mean related to the self and not some cultural norm? What does it mean to be pure? I looked the word pure up in the dictionary and it comes from the Latin word purus, meaning clean or unmixed. Well, seems like I didn’t have to research that, but then I ask myself. What does being clean and unmixed mean? Is it only something I can lose or could I also become clean and unmixed? I drilled a little further in various dictionaries and found that it can also mean complete. So it's less something that we lose and more something that we are becoming. We can become complete at any time, no matter how much sin we have done in our lives. There's always a way to become complete, no matter what point in life we are at. On our journey to purity, we often have to throw stuff out. We have to unmix and clean ourselves from the things that don't serve us anymore. And in process of cleaning out the self, we learn to let go and set boundaries of what we think we are. Writing them down can help to get unstuck. Sticking to non-negotiable for a while can lead to an increase in confidence. If you then find it hard to stick to your own boundaries you might have to rephrase them. Just know that through these boundaries you are defining your self-worth. Don’t set boundaries that make you worth less than you think you are worth! When you develop self-worth and love, it will lead to higher levels of confidence, and in the journey, you will start to feel complete, pure. What you'll notice is that you'll start to enjoy your journey to self-completion. And don't expect to arrive somewhere. Because in the journey of self-discovery the only thing that actually counts is the journey itself. It is never too late to set on this journey.
Looking at purity from this angle it has changed its face completely. It made me stop feeling lost and to beat myself up about things I have done in my life and decisions I have made that I think were wrong. Because I take purity out of my past and put it into my future, something I work towards by living in the now. Purity isn’t something I have lost along the way of trying things, experiencing and doing questionable actions. Everything I did on my journey so far I did to become complete and has its rightful place in my life. Being pure can then almost be put on one level with reaching enlightenment or nirvana. By the end, the word pure will only be what believe that it is. Yet, we don’t have to blindly believe what we have been told. People tell you their own believes when they educate you what means they don’t tell you everything.