In my subconscious quest for self-discovery, I have learned how little I know about my own life. While I know the history of my life, as I would assume that most people do, and the memorable circumstances that define that history, I now understand that I only know pockets of what my subconscious has registered as the significant events of my life. Therefore, I ponder a little about questions that some might argue would be relevant only if the potential value could be of great significance. But how do I know what the potential value might be if I paid no attention to the questions that my mind ponders?
What about those events in my life that I do not know or do not recall? Are they insignificant or do other people who know and can recall some of those aspects of my life use those aspects to define me? Doesn’t that therefore mean that there is something actually normal in what we tend to complain about, that people judge us unfairly based on little or no information that they have about us? In other words, people will never know all about us, but they will always base their assessments of us on partial information – and that is okay, since we do not truly know all about ourselves either. If I asked someone who knows me well for their impressions of me (what sort of person he/she thinks I am), chances are that what I would hear the person say about me would be things that I was not thinking or had never even thought of about myself. Does that mean that the person is wrong in his/her assessment of me? Perhaps not; nor does it mean that the person is accurate because who I truly am is much more than the product of a simple reflective exercise.
What we think we know about ourselves and others may be no more than just a glance, which we then amplify into an image that never truly tells the complete story of our existence and/or who we are. We are able to market ourselves and others as good, bad, superior or inferior based on the images that we have created that may or may not be wholly true about ourselves and others. What is really true is that our life stations are often determined by circumstances over which we have no control. We are not always successful just because we work harder than others but often because some circumstances align in our favor to help make us so. For example, we have no power to stop time or to determine what people would cross our paths in life. Yet, the impact of time and connections and inter-connectedness (or lack thereof) in the life of every living creature cannot be overemphasized. A year goes and another comes as one day folds and gives way to the next, then one week followed by another, and a month after the one before it. We live, not because we are special and do great things, but because we are beneficiaries of grace bigger than us. I know this because I am a product of that grace, a fact that makes me feel no greater or less than anyone else and, yet a fact that I feel confers on me responsibilities beyond what would otherwise be my own human and natural desires for self-aggrandizement.