I wrote the Hatata in a cave. Not metaphorically — an actual cave, outside Axum, where I had fled after the authorities found my teachings incompatible with their interests. I had two choices: recant, or think. I chose to think.
What I found, sitting with nothing but reason and the natural world, is that the foundations of ethics do not require the authority of any tradition or institution. They require only that you ask the right questions honestly and follow where they lead. Juana, writing from her convent in New Spain in the same century, found this in her way as well.
To examine your life is to take responsibility for your conclusions. It is to refuse the consolation of inherited answers when your own reasoning produces different ones. This is frightening. The authorities who drove me to that cave understood something correctly: a person who thinks for themselves is harder to govern. But they misunderstood the implication. The person who thinks for themselves is subject to a law more rigorous than custom: the law of their own honestly reached conclusions.
What conclusions have you been avoiding because they might require you to change something difficult?