The only thing shared to any experience you make is your own presence.
Think about it; there is not a single event in your life that is not inseparably linked to your personality, your outlook in life, and your values. The big problem, however, is that in every situation that comes your way, you yourself are the one thing you can impossibly perceive directly. So, you will usually start off life with the feeling that you have a pretty good grasp of who you are, but then as you grow older and life becomes increasingly unbearable, you are confronted head on with situations that will challenge your certainty.
Maybe you will miss someone very close to you or worse, lose that person. Maybe you will graduate from a university and discover that you are clueless to what you want to do with the rest of your life. Maybe you will go on a prolonged visit to a prison, hospital or both. Maybe a shark will bite your leg off. Or maybe you will be disappointed because you misplace your favorite pair of pajamas.
What is certain is that sooner or later you will reach a point in your life where questions like the following will arise: Who am I? How do others perceive me? What am I really like? Am I an artist? Am I pedantic? Do I want to be rich? Will I go to heaven? Am I Brad Pitt? Should I eat tuna for lunch? What does the fox say?
I don’t want to play games on you. These are some heavyweight questions. Quite undoubtedly, you will spend the rest of your life trying to come up with answers and your true nature may never be revealed to you. What doesn’t make the problem any simpler is that there is a multitude of methods that claim to support you in determining your personality. There’s going to the shrink, religion, alcohol or any poison of your choice, self-help books, literature, suppression, art, and the list just goes ever on. Yet still, you don’t have the complete and concrete embodiment of who you really are. But another concept hangs in the air which nudges you that it is okay not to entirely know who you are because there’s this element of “surprise” in life making existence a bit, if not entirely interesting. As they say, “let life surprise you or surprise yourself”.
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