A friend who recently retired told me he's having difficulty figuring out who he is without a job.
He spent his entire life working and following a routine without ever developing much of a personality.
And he's not alone.
A personality is defined as the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual.
There's nothing distinctive about me,
He said.
My beliefs are not my own,
They were handed to me.
And I've never reached for anything in life except for a promotion.
I have tried so hard to blend in that I faded into the background.
Few people ever question what moral qualities are distinctive to them unless certain life events force them to self-reflect.
My buddy Mike wrote a book entitled Going Home about his time in prison,
Where for the first time in his life,
Nobody cared that he was a CEO,
A husband,
A father,
Or anything other than inmate number 60419066.
All the labels with which he had previously identified were stripped from him.
It took going to prison for him to realize he was already in one.
He essentially freed himself while behind bars.
A woman who recently lost her only grandchild told me she has to constantly remind herself of everything else she was before she became a grandmother or she starts feeling like she has lost everything.
And a year after my buddy Jesse came out as gay,
He realized his orientation is only as much a part of him as his hair color,
Not his personality.
Who are we is a deep question,
And it's important not to confuse identity with personality.
According to Jewish law,
For example,
I am technically Jewish by birth,
Even if I never identify as such.
The questions that constantly ring in my head are,
How am I Jewish?
How am I Buddhist?
What else am I?
And according to whom?
When I first heard Tyler Durden say,
You are not your job.
You are not how much money you have in the bank.
You are not the car you drive.
You are not the contents of your wallet.
And you are not your f***ing khakis.
I literally owned 42 pairs of khakis,
Drove a sports car,
And I worked at a law firm.
I thought that's who I was,
But I wasn't even close.
Identities can be restricting and confining if we identify with our job or relationship status,
Our health,
Youth,
Or anything that is either temporary or directly contradicts what we know in our core to be true.
Gender identity is a perfect example of how personal and individual these answers must be,
Rather than anyone deciding for us.
But again,
Be it gender,
Religion,
Wealth,
Or health,
Identity is not the same as personality.
I would go as far as to say that when we set aside the identities that segregate each of us,
We tap into the personality,
The moral quality,
That celebrates all of us.
On the one hand,
We have Buddhism,
Which is all about awakening to our interconnectedness.
But on the other hand,
Personality is determined by qualities distinctive to an individual.
So which is it?
I picture the Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree and realizing that we are all one.
Who we are,
Therefore,
Is collective,
Fluid,
And interconnected.
Something doesn't need to happen to each of us for it to matter to all of us.
And nothing needs to happen to all of us for it to matter to each of us.
Our personality is dependent when any concern with me changes to we.
And instead of asking who am I,
We ask who am I in relation to everyone and everything else?
In answer to that question,
Who I am is another you,
And who you are is another me.
As Neal Donald Walsh said,
Life is not a process of discovery,
It's a process of creation.
You are not discovering who you are,
But creating yourself anew.
Seek,
Therefore,
Not to find out who you are,
But to determine who you want to be.
