Who Are We Really…
Exploring The Individual
Your alarm clock rings for the first time. You’ve never been woken up by anything besides your mom up to this day. As your eyes open to the early sun, you look to your side and notice your bag is already packed.
Mom opens your bedroom door and tells you to get ready for school. It’s your first day and you are both nervous and excited.
Walking to the bus stop you hold on to your mom’s hand tight, afraid to let go. Before getting on the bus, your mom kisses you on the forehead and reminds you you’re special.
Upon arriving at school, one of the first things you’re told is that you’re unique and that makes you special. Everyone is unique and you should be nice and respectful for that reason.
That’s what I want to explore here.
What is the individual, how special are we really, and how different are we from one another?
Let’s start with the physical.
Our bodies are all composed of the same elements. Primarily hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.
We really are what we eat.
In order to grow you need to eat.
The more you think about it, the more you’ll realize that essentially, your body really is a combination of what you ate from the time of birth until now. A slight variation in diet would make you a different person.
Some people believe that if you eat meat, you also take in the pain and feelings that those animals had.
Regardless of your beliefs, your body grew and grows because of the food you eat. The combination of everything you ate since birth has had an impact on how you are physically today.
It may not vary much from person to person, but the physical differences could theoretically come down to only a “few” atoms.
Of course, there are other factors that determine what your body will be like - the obvious being your genetics.
Genetics may determine up to 80% of your weight and body shape. Your parents, their parents, and their grandparents all affect your physical self.
A slight variation in your family lineage would mean you are completely physically different. Only your siblings share the same unique family tree, yet there’s still a difference between you.
So what decides the other 20%?
Something as small as the physical activities you do may change your body. If you work with your hands a lot, perhaps you have calluses. If you hit your head, maybe you have a bump.
There’s an endless amount of events, activities, or accidents that could happen to you throughout your life to change your body physically that make you as an individual truly unique.
When your mom tells you you’re special, she doesn’t mean you’re special because you have a callus on your hand. The physical attributes that make you uniquely you, don’t really make you special.
Chances are someone else has a similar scar on their body, someone else has the same haircut, or someone else broke their leg at the age of 3 climbing up a bunk bed making one leg slightly longer than the other growing up.
Very specific, I know…
Truth is, any physical attribute of yourself that makes you insecure is actually shared by more people than you think.
The individual’s mind, however, sees these things as “flaws”. Others do not share these flaws and automatically they come to the conclusion that this makes them lesser.
From the time you are born each experience you have, each piece of food you eat, makes you uniquely you, an individual.
If 80% is determined by your genetics that means there’s still 20% that’s determined by everything else.
Your body is essentially a collage of every unique experience that has happened to you from the time you were born. That includes the food you’ve eaten and the experiences you’ve had.
You should be proud of your body today for it represents your experiences. It makes you an individual, it makes you unique and it makes you special.
Now, close your eyes… What do you see?
The physical world is seen through your hands and it is felt with your other senses. If you had no senses you would still be an individual… would you not?
At the end of the day, the physical world only matters up to a point. If you lose one of your senses, you will still have to live with your mind - you will still be a unique individual.
Even everything you see in the physical world, your mind is what is interpreting it to shape your human experience.
Theoretically, one person could see a tree and think it’s a bird, whereas you see it’s a tree. The difference is what your mind is interpreting.
How you interpret your everyday experiences is moulded by what has happened to you in the past, your knowledge, or your memories. Your knowledge, your mind, your thoughts and your choices, shape who you are as an individual.
This may not make sense but I will do my best to explain it in the simplest terms.
The entire man-made world as we know it is derived from thoughts. Anything that was made by man, was first thought of. (Thank you Steve Jobs for that one).
Anything you’ve done, you thought of first.
Your thoughts quite likely are controlling your life today as you know it. Your thoughts and mind control your fears and your happiness.
As you read that, one word may have triggered anxiety or excitement.
After reading the first sentence you probably looked around and realized that the chair you’re sitting on came from thought… The phone in your hand was first thought of by Steve Jobs, and the electricity powering the lights (that were thought of by Thomas Edison) was thought of by Benjamin Franklin.
At least once while reading that paragraph you likely thought about what you have to do tomorrow, the laundry in the washing machine or got anxious about a conversation you need to have with your girlfriend.
Before you do anything, you first think about it.
Your thoughts are constantly affecting how you feel and what happens to you throughout your life. They affect how you treat others, where you work, and what you do daily.
They are the only thing you have to live with regardless of what you want. Your thoughts have shaped you into who you are today.
This is why people want to master their minds and thoughts.
The whole human experience from birth to now has been thought of in your mind and interpreted based on your past experiences and your senses as you know them. All of which is controlled by your brain, your mind.
Your mind is everything.
The average human makes 35,000 decisions every day.
The ability to make good choices is debatably the most important skill one can train. Every day since you were born you made decisions, and those decisions shaped your life as you know it today.
Improving your decision-making skills by 1% would have a tremendous impact on your life in the long term. The choice to go to bed 30 minutes earlier, to eat healthy today or work out, or simply the choice to study longer.
All these choices make you who you are as a person.
Each time you pick to do anything, it alters your reality, the outcome of your day, and who you are. Your choices make you special, they make you unique, and they make you an individual.
It could be said that you are a compilation of your choices and one variation in any of those daily choices change who you are. The endless combinations of choices you make in your life make you completely unique from the next person.
They make you an individual.
We have to ask ourselves, what affects our thoughts? What affects our human experience and our choices? If we know this, we could better ourselves, our lives, and our world.
The two main things that affect our thoughts and choices (as we explored above) and make us who we are is our environment, and our knowledge (our memories). These two things if managed, trained and worked on in the right manner could have a great impact on us, the individual.
We all know, when you improve the individual, you improve society.
Society is a compilation of all of us individuals. We are all chess pieces moving in different directions on a chessboard that is the world. We all move differently which is why it is the individual’s responsibility to know themselves.
To win the game as a society and have the best experience with our time here, we have to work to improve ourselves and be aware, of our true nature.
To be self-aware is our greatest responsibility as an individual.
This leaves us with one question…
What is the best way to improve the individual?
Until next time,
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