Between contextual and immutable identities
the stickiness of what may be true and what may change about ourselves
There are different ways of thinking about the way humans move through time.
One way is that we are stagnant, and time moves like a stream through our lives like captured images move through a camera. Another way is the opposite; time stands still while we move from one point to the other—from the past to the future. Still, another way is that both time and the individual stand still and grow within each other and yet another says that time has many versions of an individual within it, and a past individual evolves in order to meet the present individual who evolves to meet their future self.
The idea that we are immutable beings moving through time, with only the effects of ageing and knowledge accumulation as evidence, is a common view that is easy to hold because we are within ourselves and to us, it feels like we do not change, not significantly at least. Just like it often takes a visitor to point out how our physical features may have wrinkled or stretched, it is not entirely visible how much we have changed in our inner selves.
There are some attributes about ourselves that are fixed in comparison or on a scale such as how tall we are and the colour of our skin, however, other attributes would benefit from the lens of difference, like two sides of a coin, and not a scale.
Whether we are introverted or extroverted usually feels like one has to be one or the other, choosing either isolation or community. But accepting differences in the ways each attribute presents shows that both types adhere to the common truth that humans are social, only that the ways they go about it are different.
This also applies to the idea that people are logical or emotional. Meanwhile, all humans are fundamentally emotional beings who are capable of feeling a variety of emotions. Recognising shared truth means understanding that everyone is both thinking and feeling and that the difference lies in how much of our own emotions we understand and allow to breathe and how much of our thoughts we decide to give credence to.
I’ve been leaning more toward the idea that many versions of ourselves exist within the time-space continuum, and each version can be unlocked depending on what, where and how much we decide to prioritise out of the duality of the attributes each of us has.
Mission 42: Look for Context
Whenever we make statements that say something about ourselves, it’s easy to assume that they are fixed and forever but they may not always be so.
If we hear someone say, “I am tall” automatically, the mind thinks about someone who is 6 feet tall and above. But that’s because the mind already has context for what a tall person is supposed to look like, as opposed to a tall panda bear for example. Not only that, the idea of being tall adheres to the shared truth that humans have height differences. On the other hand, if someone says “I am a loner,” it goes against the shared human attribute of people needing to be social. And so I would ask, even of myself: in what context are you a loner? In what context are you socially awkward? In what context—in what time or place or tradition—do consider yourself friendly?
We begin to see how the individual changes depending on the time and the space they occupy in the world. Maybe noticing this will begin to pay more attention to our environment and what surrounds us, and take more time to curate environments that enable us to embody attributes we would love to reflect even more.