Who Are You?

 

“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.” ~ Edmund Burke

Monday this week felt like the entire week in a day. The results of the presidential election in Kenya 2022 were finally declared and life started resuming a semblance of normalcy with businesses reopening and people coming off their screens and back to the streets. I had my moments of being carried away but for the most part, I made some good progress on completing some pending projects, crafting, and reading.

An old friend mentioned they were reading a biography and I got thinking – why does history fascinate us? Is there any value to looking up the lives of men and women of old who we consider lived remarkably and what should we do about what we learn from those stories?

In Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson states rule 2 as ‘Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that.’  He asks a couple of profound questions early in the chapter – ‘Who are you?’ and ‘Who could you be, if you were everything you could conceivably be?’ He theorizes that the difficulty in answering these questions arises because at any given moment we are not only who we are, but we are also becoming who we could be.

Your potential at a given time may be obscured by ill health, financial difficulties, misfortune, and the general tragedies of life. it may also be hidden by your unwillingness to take full advantage of the opportunities that life offers you and by your failures of discipline, faith, commitment, and imagination.

So, who are you? And more importantly, who could you be, if you were everything you could conceivably be? Are you taking any steps towards becoming who you could be? Are you constantly practicing failures that are keeping you glued to your current situation or practicing habits that are moving you forward to who you could be becoming?

One of the appealing things about biographies is that they are written after the fact of a life lived. We can in a few pages see what obstacles were overcome and what disciplines were employed to overcome the hurdles in our heroes’ lives. Given that nothing under the sun is new, we are then able to apply some of the lessons to our lives as we pursue similar goals or outcomes as those who have gone before us. In good biographies, the author allows us to see and live through some of the challenges of life that were present during their time – famines, war, disease, discrimination, and scarcity, to name a few. These show us that there never is a time in life when all the tees are crossed and the eyes are dotted, yet life goes on and those who come out triumphant on the other end are the ones who found ways to move forward, in spite and despite the challenges that stared them down.

Our heroes saw the chaos of their current states and used their powers of imagination and visualization to dream of a better world for themselves and those that mattered to them. Whether it was freedom from slavery, financial emancipation, or spiritual transcendence in the face of evil – they used their imagination to see a better world and then employed various disciplines in life to work towards their visions. We read about those journeys and marvel at the achievements. We should never forget that we are also on our personal journeys and the sooner we map a path to who we could become, the sooner we collect the necessary tools and get to work crafting that vision.

Jordan concludes: Imagine who you could be, then aim single-mindedly at that. I concur.

“Only when we face the impossible, and experience the unbearable, do we find out who we truly are.” ~ Vironika Tugaleva