“Like a tree!”

We all have potential to do something, to be someone else. We have potential to become suicide terrorists, we have potential to become politicians or scientists. What we can be, is an endless amount of knowns and unknowns. What can be defined, is what we are.

Hence if what we are is not defined by what we can be, it must be defined be what we have been, what we were. After all, we are a result of what has happened to us and the actions we have chosen to do.

When we mishear, we still hear real words. When we see something we cannot precisely make out, we see something that ‘probably’ fits. We improvise what we think we perceive by recalling past experience – what could be said in the specific situation, what could we be seeing in a place we are looking at. We look for familiar patterns in strange places to find ‘probable’ objects to perceive. Objects we have seen, sounds we have heard. In the past.

We learn from past events, from experience, and we change through time. These changes can be subtle, such as picking up a new hobby could cause bias towards a different kind of thinking, or huge, like moving to a new place can change how we see the world. The result of these changes is us, our personality, our essence. Even our own actions change us – when we say something, the words often come back to haunt us, to make us change our minds or reassure us of the correctness of our opinions. We think about our decisions time and time again after they’ve been made and the consequences have been observed. We keep thinking, and that changes us.

Once we have experienced something, we have changed. Perhaps so little we cannot even notice it, perhaps more. And the result of these changes is us. What has happened to us and what we have made happen are the things that define us. We are what we were. Regardless of potential.

I know you’ve read similar talk in parts before on this blog but not as a whole. And it is about time to piece it together.