Finding Joy

Knowing

"I thought I knew myself until I got married and I'm realizing things about me I didn't know." My friend said that me and I thought that was a perceptive thought. Because during this whole pandemic, I've learned more about myself than I have in the last three years.
The idea of knowing ourselves is relative to how much we experienced in life. A lot of times as we grow up we will have developed a good idea of who we are. And that's because we base it off of how we have handled the things we have been exposed to thus far. But if we only been exposed to 15% of things that can happened in life. We only know 15% of ourselves. The part where we feel confident in who we are is based on getting through the trials we have faced and connecting that to future trials in hopes that experience will create a consistent pattern. However, there's truly is no way to be certain that is the case unless you get to that moment. Once we have been through everything that the journey of living can grant, we won't know ourselves completely. Since our life can only extend so far, we fail to be completed. Perfection is defined as completeness. If we inherited perfection the experiences of life would be cut in half to only positive things in life. Because in a perfect world, crime, hate, injustices, heartache, sickness all wouldn't exist. Therefore, we would have only the good things to live through. And since we would love forever, we can reach a complete knowledge of who we are or at least be close to it. Living with imperfection, however, increases live experiences because of a wicked system. Both good and bad circumstances befall us all. Since our lives are cut short to an average of 80 or 90 years, we don't get the honor of completely knowing ourselves. Wisdom comes with age generally because of exposing yourself to more experiences in life. Molding their attributes into their vessel of self.

The belief of knowing ourselves, like I said before, is recognizing and analyzing behavioral patterns. If this was how you reacted in this situation therefore you would react that way in another situation. But we won't know, honestly and truly know, until we face that situation. David showed restraint and self-control in killing Saul. He had the opportunity but held back. That act of not killing Saul, someone who was intent on killing him, should reflect later on in other situations. But it didn't. You can believe you possess a quality and it'll reach all aspect of your life. King David reached a situation where restraint and self-control was to be expressed when he saw Bathsheba. (How well can you know yourself if you have only unlocked level five of a hundred levels of self-control?) Joseph, on the other hand, kept showing restraint and self-control on different occasions. If life was like math, we would be able to take all the variables contributing to consistently, check the pattern and then running a test to see whether or not that was the correct pattern and say, "Yes, that is who I am." But the variable isn't the same in each equation we face. It's a new formula that we need to solve each time something happens and slowly build our personal. Since life is unpredictable, we can't theoretically solve unreached obstacles using previous methods because once you get there the variable needed is different. This kind of excites me and it's also really humbling. It helps developing over-confidence if I think about it. I'll never really know how I'd be in certain situations. I can try to prepare but as many will tell you, it's hard to prepare for uncertainty. I'm excited to see what kind of person I'll be.

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I had a thought. I was talking to my friend about understanding myself better within these last few months. She had agreed concerning herself. She expressed that she thought she knew who she was but with this new aspect of life, she came to realize she didn't. I really thought that was interesting. The fact that we are discovering these parts of ourselves that we hadn't seen before or was aware of was because we haven't been exposed to these circumstances before. It got me thinking... If we live our lives only being exposed to 15% of the things that life offers, then we can only know 15% of who we are. Since we don't have the opportunity to live a long life to explore more, we get cut short in knowing ourselves completely. And to know yourself completely is unreachable not only because our lifespan but because of our environment. If you did get to live 200 years but you stayed living in the same place with the same routine and interacted with the same people, eating the same foods because that's what's comfortable to you, in all 200 years of your life, you've only granted yourself a small percent of what you could offer. I think that's why it's encouraged to go travel and experience new things. Because in that lies the opportunity to see what you have to offer. Along the same lines as the expression, "You never know until you try". You could never know you have a knack for making candles if you've never tried to do so. The beautiful part of life is that we are malleable creatures, ever growing. Just like re-reading the same book and coming across new findings, we could revisit things we didn't like before and it could be a completely new response this time around. Because of the new experiences and the variety of people we met, our thinking has been molded and our viewpoint on things was updated. We are forever unlocking parts ourselves, re-discovering, reinventing... We could live forever and still be curious about our potential. There are so many things that life has to offer. It offers bad things but it also deals us a ton of good things. We are wonderfully made. There's so many things we don't know but we could find out. Whether it be about the human body, weather, animals, languages, food, art, your family, friends and even yourself. I don't think we can ever know ourselves completely. Even if we did experience 15% of life, we don't always come to a conclusion of how those experiences affected us. That's where people doubt and become unsure. Because out of the 15% of life we lived, we only understood 5% of our behaviors that came along with it. That leaves us feeling uneasy from the lack understanding or feeling lost or incomplete. When you come to a knowledge of 15% of who you are to match the 15% you experienced, it feels like you've completed the discovery of you. In reality there's still 85% percent of life yet to be unveiled and 85% levels of you unseen.