How we understand and define ourselves may be one of the most important factors shaping how we relate to ourselves, to others and to the external world.

Some of us define ourselves through what we “know”. What we believe we know with certainty comes to define who we are. The stronger and less questionable our confidence in our knowledge, learning and beliefs becomes, the more ideological we become, because regardless of the content of those beliefs a stronger dogma guides us. The more certain we are of what we know, the more rigid and authoritarian we can become.

Some of us define ourselves through what we “do not know”. We become seekers of truth, yet this not-knowing, unbelief and fluidity can throw us in any direction and makes it difficult to create an identity that can endure and be relied upon. If we allow ourselves to be thrown everywhere, we become not travellers in search of truth but wanderers lost in chaos.

Some of us define ourselves through our “victories and possessions” and come to an end in the stillness of that definition. Others, disillusioned, finally equate themselves with their “failures and misfortunes” and fall with that identification into emptiness and insignificance.

A deep understanding that we are neither what we know nor what we do not know, neither our victories and possessions nor our suffering and defeats, makes it possible for us to fall neither into ideology nor into agnosticism and confusion, neither into stagnation nor into nihilism.

The world is full of people who think they know; people who tremble at the thought that they know nothing; people blinded by pride in their achievements and possessions; and people broken and bowed by failure.

Among them, only a few remember that “my true self” is what connects all these things while remaining irreducible to any of them. It is the continuity at the centre of my being that learns, steps into what is unknown, achieves without stopping, fails but rises after every fall, and is reborn after every death.

Let us remember: I am not what I know, nor can I be reduced to what I do not know. I am not exhausted by my possessions and my past, nor do I end in my failures and what I lack. I am the continuity that, from childhood until today, has passed through many of these things and will continue to pass through them. Something within us is never wholly confined to time and place, and what we call “I” is only a limited moment of that continuity in this time and this place.

Aydin Areta