Do Your Special Qualities Define Who You Really Are?
Note: This is another in a series of blogs related to a book I’ve been writing. The book is called, The Slightly Older Person’s Guide to Graceful Aging.
If the quality or qualities you believe make you special were to evaporate, would you know who you are? I’m deliberately asking what I know to be a loaded question. It’s common for us to define who we are by what we believe makes us stand apart from the mass of humanity.
If you ask people to define themselves, they’ll invariably go to the skills, abilities, and features they believe set them apart. It’s a way to say, “I’m not like him, I’m not like her, in fact I’m not like anybody else, and I can prove it by what I know, or can do, or have that others don’t.”
At first glance, it seems logical to go in that direction. The odd thing is, rather than giving us a sense of who we really are, setting ourselves apart severs the sense of connection to everyone and everything we naturally have.
There’s a good reason why this sense of connection is important. It’s where our sense of well-being comes from, and lives. Without it, we can spend our whole lives feeling that something vital and meaningful in our lives is missing.
In other words, we isolate ourselves and then wonder why we feel isolated. It’s a perfect example of how, in striving to identify and define ourselves, we get the opposite effect.
To know ourselves on a meaningful level, we do much better when we’re willing to look at what it means to be human, rather than what it means to be this particular human.
It’s like telling someone, “If you want to get a close-up view of that painting, you’ll have to stand farther away.” The words don’t seem to make sense, given what we think we know. But when we stand back, we get a sense of the whole that wasn’t available when we were standing too close. We see what we didn’t before; where the detail we were giving a close looks fits into the bigger picture.
When we attempt to know ourselves through our knowledge, skills, or particular gifts, we’re essentially trying to see the biggest picture you could imagine through the smallest possible window. We can’t hope to get an accurate view. All we can see are details, which by themselves mean nothing.
The details of our lives, our preferences, our likes and dislikes, our skills, our particular gifts have nothing to do with the fundamentals of who we really are.
I can’t describe the sense of freedom I felt when I was able to see for myself that on the most elemental, fundamental levels, it’s how much we’re like other humans that offers the sense of connection and inclusion we all crave.
Each apparently separate individual human is a spiritual creature having, as Pierre Tielhard de Chardin put it, a human experience. The consciousness that animates each of us is the same, single consciousness. We are, quite literally, one. We are simply localizations of that same, single consciousness.
When I saw that, it became absolutely clear that none of the qualities or accomplishments I thought defined me had no more to do with who I really was than the color of a car has to do with the basic functions of that car.
If you want to know how that car works, focusing on the paint job won’t give you and true or useful information. If you’re interested in who you really are, focus on what makes you human, not what makes you special.
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