“It is my growing conviction that my life belongs to others just as much as it belongs to myself and that what is experienced as most unique often proves to be most solidly embedded in the common condition of being human.” - Henri Nouwen
I remember waking up on the morning of my twenty-first birthday with one thought:
I am glad I exist.
It had not occurred to me before, with a tone of such sonority, that it was a wonder to be anything at all, let alone a self - to have a name, face, a place in the world. That each of us is not something, but someone. No matter how small we ever come to feel, we remain irreducibly, relentlessly human.
So what does it mean to be a self? Every notion of the self eventually ends in paradox. A duality. On one hand, distance and isolation; on the other, intimacy and connectedness. The impetus for every relationship arising from the tension between the two.
This train of thought led me to two separate, but not disparate concepts regarding the self which are frequently conflated - Individuality and Identity.
1. Individuality
I have always been fascinated by the psychology underlying individual differences. Temperaments, traits and types; enneagrams, assessments, inventories.
Personality tests appear to operate on a principle akin to that of the classification of music across genres. Pop. Punk rock. Electronic. Blues. Sure, the divisions may be arbitrary and often misplaced - but not reductive in the least. Rather, they capture in their stride the diversity of different styles, laying them out across a spectrum, visible and plain.
I think it's the same way with people - while our present knowledge of human personality is far from exhaustive, "categorising" people can often provide a framework through which we can appreciate the nuances of human behaviour and tendencies. Instead of diminishing individuality, it deepens it. Even the beauty in Art stems from a representation of chaos, organised into a form in which it can be presented, studied and perhaps even understood.
But is introspection a well? Do our attempts to know ourselves help us any further along our road towards a purposeful, well-lived life? Henri Nouwen writes:
Self-affirmation and self-emptying are not opposites because no man can give away what he does not have. No one can give himself in love when he is not aware of himself. Nobody can come to intimacy without having found his identity.
In searching inwardly, we narrow our gaze. One must do so in probing depths. But the limits of self-awareness lie in the strange metaphysical notion that who we are - who we really are - has nothing very much to do with us at all.
As the first line of Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life reads: It's not about you. And if that is true, we have to look much further, higher, beyond ourselves for answers.