WHO AM I

“Well-makers lead the water (wherever they like); fletchers bend the arrow; carpenters bend a log of wood; wise people fashion themselves. – Gautama Buddha”

            Change is inevitable; it is something that we cannot stop from happening. The question of who I really am is a question that had always bothered me. It is a question that I have asked myself for a countless times.

            According to Julian Baggani, a British philosopher is that we are a collection of experiences. We are in a some ways, we are very very complex collection or a collection of things He states that we don’t discover or search for our true self; instead we have the free will to create our self or to decide what we are going to be. I kind of agree with what the philosopher have mentioned in some ways because I think the decisions I made and the choices I have chosen are basically the reasons of how I created myself for the past 20 years.

            We were born without innate ideas or knowledge in mind or as John Locke has said, the mind is a blank slate or tabula rasa. We, as we grow up, tend to increase our intellectual ability or any other ability as well, because of the sense perception we have developed. Our desires and beliefs as we grow older is something that we create, we try to own this as our own in order for us to become something we want to be. For the past years, I have been joining different activities that I guess would try to help me shape myself in a way that I like. I have joined leadership training/s, tried running for election to become an officer of different organization. I have also joined different group contest during my high school. I have tried doing things that I am afraid of. Yes, this is my mindset for how I want to create myself. I want to explore things that I don’t know; I want to overcome the fears that I have. They may have been some instances that wherein situations try to result to some things that I do not expect, I guess how I respond to it is something that would have a say on how I am going to be. I am a person who is indeed filled with negative thoughts, I overthink things but the way I talk is something that is in contrast with it. I want to talk of positive things. And if I try to compare myself from who I have been from the past few years, I guess I have been into different versions of me already. And as another year try to add up on my age, another version of me is about to be created, a lot of other changes are happening. If we try to sum up all of these versions of myself, I would conclude that is what I consider myself to be. I am a collection of these different experiences that has led me to changes; changes that I am happy about because this how I have chosen to create myself.

            “We actually have the capacity to channel the direction of our development for ourselves to something else.” And most probably the choices I will be making in the future will also be another part of how I would create myself. What I am going to be is my own choice, my own decisions, my own creations.