Hello again,
Welcome.
Can I ask you a question?
Have you ever wondered?
Who am I?
Have you ever looked at other people and thought,
They seem so certain about who they are.
What they enjoy,
What makes them happy.
What they want to do with their life.
And from this you may have wondered.
Why don't I know?
Who I am.
From a young age,
People begin asking us.
What do you want to be?
What are you good at?
What do you think you'll end up doing?
And without even noticing,
We begin asking those same questions of ourselves.
Searching for a right answer.
The right description of who we are.
Of what we should do with our life.
People can ask.
Are you a shy person?
Are you confident?
Creative?
Funny.
Sporty.
Are you academic?
As if one description could ever contain the mystery.
Of what we are.
Yet the mind keeps searching for an answer that will finally explain everything.
But have you noticed how every description changes with time?
Maybe at one point you believed you were shy.
Until you realized that you felt comfortable speaking in front of a group of people.
At times you may have felt that you were not creative.
Until you begin enjoying art classes.
So any belief about who you are only seems true until life shows you something else.
Every new experience has the chance to show us something new about ourselves.
Before the mind decides what it means.
Before our memory connects it to a past experience.
Or before the mind begins creating a story about who we are.
There is simply this moment.
Fresh and new,
With no history attached.
Yet almost immediately the mind,
By habit,
Reaches out trying to interpret,
To understand.
To define each moment.
Now this is who I am.
This is the kind of person I am.
And before we know it again,
Each lived experience has become another part of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.
From that moment,
New experiences begin to be interpreted through yesterday's idea of who we are.
The life continues to unfold,
Without a memory,
Without a past.
And each new experience reveals a little more.
Something new.
Something that yesterday's idea of who we are could never contain.
So perhaps life has never been asking you to define yourself.
Instead,
It has simply been inviting you.
To keep exploring.
To keep learning,
To keep discovering.
Not becoming someone else by allowing life to reveal more of itself through each lived experience.
So the question isn't really,
Who am I?
The deeper question may be whether you need to know it all.
And you don't have to decide once and for all who you are.
Perhaps you can simply be,
Or allow each experience to be just as it is.
Before turning it into yet another story of who you are.
Remaining open.
To what life is quietly revealing,
Moment by moment.
