Denne gangen ønsker jeg rett og slett å videreformidle en tekst som jeg synes er så vakker, og klok (i den grad en tekst kan være klok). Og den traff meg så hardt. Som menneske, og medmenneske. Det er starten på en bok som heter «Finding Awareness» og som er skrevet av Amit Pagedar. Jeg håper dere vil finne ordene hans like verdifulle som jeg gjorde. Ikke minst i tiden vi lever i nå.
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Who are we?
We are whoever the world teaches us to be.
A distant cousin of my father was an intimidating figure, both in his physicality and accomplishment. He was the most educated man in my extended family, with three PhDs, and a successful business to his name. Everyone respected him, although I feared him more than anything else. At age 15, any figure of authority speaking with a loud booming voice would worry me. This fear had only amplified after my dad told me, why my uncle was making this surprise visit.
“Listen to what your uncle says. He wants to talk to you. Take him seriously if you want to make something out of life in the future” he admonished me. I had not shown any real interest or promise in my studies, as such, I braced for this intervention. This was a routine in my household. When I struggled with my studies, my parents would invite someone over to talk sense into me. I knew what to expect. I was prepared, although a little unnerved. Soon he arrived and my mother offered him some tea. After taking a few sips and exchanging pleasantries, he turned to me.
“I am not here to talk about your studies or education, even though I`m sure your parents would want me to talk about those things”, he said in a calm tone. “I am not concerned about those things” he said with a dismissive gesture of his hand.
I wondered what was on his mind. The change of plans was unexpected, but I looked forward to hearing about anything but schoolwork. He had my full attention.
“I am here to ask you a question, perhaps the most important question, anyone will ever ask you” he continued. “I think you are old enough to understand this. If not, we will find out anyway. So tell me Amit, `Who are you?”
Nobody had seen this coming. My father was as surprised as I was. Silence filled the room. His question confused me. Who was I, indeed? I thought about it carefully and then spoke. I didn`t want to say anything obvious, so I put together an answer I felt would impress him.
“I am someone who enjoys watching movies, excels at playing video games, and is interested in studying astronomy”.
“A good enough answer. Now tell me Amit, do any of your friends like these things too?” he asked. I replied, “Yes, they do!”
“How interesting. So would you be doing any of those things, had it not been for your friends?”, he asked while taking a sip from the tea.
Again, the same silence.
I took a minute to think about it. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed as if everything I liked somehow reflected the things my best friends were doing at the time. I watched the same movies as they did; I was playing the same games, listening to the same music. I even seemed to like astronomy because Carl Sagan`s Cosmos was popular then, and those who watched it were considered to be smart. It suddenly dawned on me that I was more interested in appearing smart, without any real curiosity in astronomy.
I began to feel uneasy as these reflections flashed over me. My confidence was replaced by self-doubt, yet I wanted to be honest. His tone and demeanor were intent, yet disarming. I could feel genuine concern for me in his voice. I replied, “No.. I wouldn`t perhaps enjoy any of those things … if it wasn`t for my friends”.
“Who are you, if not for your friends and family? Do you know that?” he pressured me.
A mild shock came over me, as he was making me confront the fact that I didn`t have any interests of my own. I studied the way my friends did; I read the books that they did; my hobbies seemed to be a reflection of their interests. I had nothing original in that 15-year-old brain of mine. It was an unsettling feeling, which is probably why I still remember that conversation. So I told him the truth. I said,
“I guess I don`t know who I am. I have no idea if I have to be honest.”
“Good. That`s the answer I was looking for. At least you are honest,” he continued. “You don`t get too far ahead if you emulate others. Most people won`t admit that whatever occupies their mind is put there by someone else. Remember, what you study is not important, if you are doing it to please your parents. None of it matters if you don`t learn how to think for yourself. Even if you go wrong following your own instincts, that`s okay, for your regrets will still be your own. If you go astray following someone else, then you don`t own even your regrets! That`s a terrible place to be as an adult. Do you understand me? This is all I have to say to you”.
This conversation was my first experience with self-awareness. I reflected on it as I began to ponder the question of how we think about ourselves. If we are to begin this journey of self-knowing, we have to examine how it all began. Let`s see if we can approach this concept of self-knowledge, as directly as possible.
When someone asks us, “Who are you” what do we usually say? We tell them our name, our profession, perhaps our nationality, and various other things that describe us. This is our identification. It consists of facts and information about us. Although that doesn`t really say who we are, does it? Who are we beyond these facts and information? How do we understand and relate to ourselves?
Our early self-knowledge begins not with knowing ourselves at all, but by knowing our parents. As children we didn`t have a sense of self, let alone self-knowledge. All we knew was that there were these two individuals who cared for us. We didn`t have any concept of the world or reality beyond what these two people were doing. When they smiled, we smiled. When they put their tongue our, we did the same. Those were our first experiences.
As my three-year-old son watches me type on the keyboard, he wants to jump in my lap and do the same. When I walk the dog, my son wants to hold the leash, just the way I do. When his mother is practicing yoga, he lays on his back and touches his toes. All he wants to do is emulate the people around him. He is watching and learning, not just about the world, but about himself too.
When we are young, our entire world revolves around our parents. When they praise us, we know we did something right. When they correct us, we realize we did something wrong. The only way we can distinguish right from wrong is through their feedback. We have no references of our own, no system to discern right from wrong. We have no rational thinking ability or any framework for decision-making. To us, whatever feels right seems right, and whatever feels wrong seems wrong. That`s why chocolate is right, and vegetables are wrong. This continues until our caregivers tell us otherwise.
The first definition of right or wrong are therefore never our own, they are given to us be our caregivers. These definitions form the basis of how we relate to the world. When we enter adolescence, our relation-ship with our parents has already formed a baseline of our self-knowledge. During this age, some parents don`t want their children to ever be hurt as they explore the world around them, and therefore overprotect them, which was the case with my parents. On the other hand, some parents have never known adequate protections as children themselves, so they (often unknowingly) under-protect their children. They let their children falter too often, resulting in fearful and anxious core experiences. This, unfortunately, describes the majority of us. Let`s look at both these cases and how they relate to our self-knowledge.
If we were overprotected, our parents controlled the smallest of our decisions. Our question “What should I do now?” almost never went unanswered. They decided what we should eat, wear, read, think, whom we were allowed to play with and so on. They overbearingly shaped and reshaped our definitions of right and wrong as we were entering young adulthood. They shielded us from every problem, protected us from all harm, and, in doing so, made us deeply dependent on them.
On the other hand, those of us who were under-protected as children took a much more treacherous path. Our parents constantly fought with each other and ignored our basic needs. In some cases, they separated, creating deep trauma and confusion in our lives. They made us choose between them. They lamented about their relationship issues as if we knew the answers that they didn`t. We were only children. To us, those were impossible problems to solve. This constant barrage of difficult problems, and the inability to solve them, took a toll on our self-esteem and self-confidence. There was no safe space for our minds to go when it needed protection. We began to see ourselves as afraid and insecure.
In both cases, whether we were insecure, or dependent we had to eventually face society in some form. First it was our peers in high-school, then our college and then perhaps our first job. Each time we made a foray into an alien world, whose rules we barely understood. We didn`t know how to be in this new world. We approached it either with overconfidence (a result of inexperience in solving our own problems) or deep insecurity (a result of having faced unsolvable problems). When our expectations crashed with reality, we made mistakes – we didn`t fit in. We were emotionally too timid or too defiant. Up until then, we didn`t need new people in our lives. But now we were thrust in the middle of them, and they didn`t seem to agree with us on anything. It began to dawn on us that if we must fit into this new society, we must somehow get its approval. We must ask it to teach us right from wrong.
Each time our social exposure widens and we enter high-school, college, graduate school or work, we go back to being children again- looking up to the new world to teach us its ways. As children, our children were our guiding lights. Now, our friends have to pick up the mantle. We ask this new world, “What should I do now?”, just like we did when we were small children. We ask our friends to show us how to speak, how to act, how to dress and what to eat, so that they may accept us. This is the state I was in when my uncle introduced me to self-awareness. I was looking to my friends to know how I should be.
In this new society, instead of a pat on the back, we look for that compliment on the way we look. Instead of a “no”, we look for hidden cues as to what`s cool and what`s out. We begin to rely on this new parent to tell us how we should be. Naturally, once we ask this society how to be, we give it control over us. We start moving away from our unique nature and be cast in the mold they have cut our for us. We begin to conform and shape ourselves in their image. In other words, we become whoever the world tells us we should be. There is no point in trying anything different. We better fall in line, for unless we do, we may not be deemed worthy of their acceptance. We may become `orphans` without the acceptance of this new caregiver.
This is how the curse of comparison first enters our lives- with a promise of acceptance and through it, some self-knowledge. Some of us have grown up while being compared to our siblings by our parents, or other kids at school by our teachers. Yet, when we are trying to find our place in a new social dynamic, comparison with others takes on a whole different meaning. We want to desperately find out who we are and comparison offers all the easy answers. We become eager to take on whatever identity the world is ready to give us, as long as it leads to some form of acceptance and security. As long as we are seen, we are willing to follow.
So who we are, is essentially a sum total of the people the world has taught us to be. We have emulated and patterned ourselves after others through this comparison for decades. Comparison has always provided the reference point by which we found our place in the world. This tendency becomes entrenched over a period of years.
It gives us this incurable habit of comparing ourselves the instant we feel uncertain about our path.
We certainly had an opportunity to reject this way of being and learn who we really were. But unfortunately, we took the path of least resistance to self-knowledge, and here we are. Perhaps this is one of the main reasons why most of us feel as if we are still wandering. We are still walking down the wrong turn we made all those years ago. We were so desperate to find ourselves, that we walked down a lane some stranger pointed to, and never looked back.
Finding Awareness: The Journey of Self-discovery. By Amit Pagedar
