Five feet six inches tall, weighing 130 pounds with brown hair and green eyes is the description given on my driver’s license. It offers along with my age a means of identification. I can be identified as being the person described. I however am not the physical form I am trapped within. I have an identity beyond my physical form. This identity is of much greater importance to my state of wholeness and personal well being. Who am I really? Am I the sum of all my actions and choices? Am I what I think or what others perceive? Am I merely an apparition or miniscule part of some obscure imagining?
Over the years I have acquired a long list of identifying labels. Some bestowed from mere association to others such as: daughter, sister, cousin, wife, mother, grandmother, neighbor or friend. Many labels are strictly related to jobs such as: lifeguard, dental assistant, office manager, gas station attendant, accountant, financial consultant or estate manager. Both of these categories are subject to individual interpretation. What it means to be a mother, for example, is different for everyone. Who I am as a mother and who my daughter is as a mother are not the same. Consequently to identify me solely as a mother would not offer much to distinguish me from someone else unless you had more specific information. To be identified as Charles Manson’s mother is certainly a unique identity as it would be to be Martin Luther King’s mother. Each of these sparks questions about who they were as people in their own right that produced such offspring. Yet even being uniquely identified does not necessarily define or encompass an identity. These labels I see as insufficient to describe myself or anyone.
Religious labels are interesting. Being Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist adds some framework to identity, as the family / friend associations and job labels do. These religious distinctions seem to hold more defined meaning but in reality are as vague as the distinction of being a mother. They do not tell us much if anything about the real person beyond the assumptions we bring to the label based on our perceptions of the religious label being applied. These stereotypes bring meaning albeit quite possibly belying the truth about an individual. They do offer more content as to the character of an individual than the description of their physical appearance.
There are people that I feel I know very well, my husband, children and my mother to name a few. These people know me better than most as well. Their uniqueness and personality are apparent to me and I would recognize them instantly. I am not however sure that I could put into words what I know or sense about them that makes them uniquely who they are.
I read a quote today from Albert Einstein, “Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.” This was so helpful to me. There are many things about each of us that miss the mark, we are not perfect nor are we meant to be so. We have limitations and faults and even in those areas that we excel we err at times. As a whole, the human race has a huge variety of abilities. As individuals we each have something that we excel at, that may in the end be something that defines or identifies us. Perhaps it is the the things that we can do rather than those that we can not that deserves our focus and attention.
Our identity is a compilation of many things, physical attributes, personal choices and actions, gifts and abilities and beliefs. It is the combination of all these things that make us a uniquely identifiable creation. It is our identity. So when we are feeling like the fish that couldn’t climb the tree we need to step back and look at ourselves through the eyes of the creator.What were you created to be?
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