Who Do You Think You Are?

Indulge me for a moment, please...

Imagine you are beside a stream of water flowing smoothly. If you were to dip your finger into the water and hold it stationary, you would see a V-shaped wake form around your finger, somewhat like the wake a boat leaves as it moves through the water. The difference is that it is the stream that is moving and so even though the water that is within the wave is changing all the time, the wave itself is stationary in relation to your finger. This is known as a "standing wave."

When we examine the question "Who am I?" we often look for the differences that set us apart from the crowd. We might tend to define ourselves in terms of distinguishing what we are from what we are not. The difficulty is that given our complexities, in many cases we are simply more of one thing than another; what I call a 60/40 generalization. For example: If I say, "I am a Taoist," even though I might also espouse the beliefs of a Buddhist, a Christian, a Moslem and a host of other spiritual traditions, I will tend to identify with the primary label for convenience.

As a practical matter, who we think we are often works out to what we resist. If my kid brother is a loudmouth and I don't like it, I might tend to consider myself to be reserved. Here's where the standing wave comes in: When I resist something and define myself as "not that," I have identified myself by virtue of what I am resisting, just as a standing wave is created by virtue of a finger's resistance to flow. The particulars may change, but the pattern remains.

The picture becomes even more interesting when we consider that such self-assessments run the risk of being fictitious. If I were to expand my social milieu, I might discover that a certain crowd thinks of me as "another one of those loudmouth kids" in spite of my self-assessment as being reserved. Curiously, I might discover that I am indeed quite similar to my kid brother but hadn't noticed since I had been deceiving myself by concentrating on the differences rather than the similarities.

Ultimately it makes sense to re-examine who we think we are in an attempt to discover what we omitted from our self-assessments. After some thought, I have found the following to be a fruitful question for inquiry:

What if most of my challenges are a result of false self-assessments based on what I am resisting?
and
To the degree that the above is true, what is causing my resistance?