Who do you think you are?

If I had to ask you to define who you are, are you ready with an answer? The truth is that many live our life without asking this fundamental question. We seem to lose the ability to wonder at the beauty of the world that surrounds us. It appears as if we get used to the environment and people around us that we take them for granted. As if we have a claim to all we have. Or, what we think we have. This is perhaps one of the misfortunes of adulthood. Believing that we are independent of everything and everyone else.

Despite our belief in free will, we cannot escape the fact that we also define ourselves by our community, political and religious convictions and many more. In this sense, our independence of thought is, essentially, not as independent as we might wish to presume. There are also other factors that we have little control over, such as our height, skin colour, sex, and physical and mental functions. But then again, it’s difficult to explain why do we treat people on the basis on how they look or behave.

Unless, of course, we admit that we cannot define who we are outside of relationships. In other words, who we are must be defined in terms of a relation we have to another person or object. Our sense of being is dependent on language, culture and thinking itself. Without our body, who would we be? All this appears to offer us a bleak picture of life because, especially in Western thought, we have grown with the idea that we are independent and autonomous beings. The idea that this self-image is incorrect is devastating to a culture that professes an “I” in his/her own right.

Here, I must admit that living with my impairments has made me realise how dependent I was on others in different ways. Ironically, I also realised how some of those “others” were disabling me by treating me differently and placing obstacles that prevented me from expressing my full potential. And now that I have a social life, work and a purpose in life, I am realising how stupidI was to aim for a ‘normality’, for an ‘independence’ and ‘autonomy’. When, now that I reflect, no one who makes a claim to his/her normality, independence and autonomy is really aware of all the conditions that had to be in place for this life to continue.

For the miracle of life isn’t much in any extraordinary supernatural event but in the very fact that we are alive in the first place. And that our inevitable reality of interdependence and the impossibility of being independent makes me realise how much we owe to the person who makes sure we have electricity, the person who prepares the bread we eat, the tea cultivators who collect the tea leaves, the person who built my bed, and do many other people who have made this moment possible.

We may not be able to change what others think of us. We may even have little control over our environment. But we can take charge off our mind if we are willing to take the time to cultivate our awareness. Then, the question about who we are becomes irrelevant. Instead, we will start asking the right questions which only we can answer.