I began by saying that identity and personality are different things. By nature of personality, I’m an optimist, curious, outgoing, those sorts of things. I was born this way. Identity is a construct. It’s about how you’re raised, what you experience, how you learn and grow, what’s important to you, your capacity for change, how you view the world. I will always be a feminist, a Jew, and a conciliator. Those are core parts of my identity. But my identity has expanded through examination, education, travel, time & aging, and a broad variety of experience (good and bad). Every person on the planet has the ability to expand their identity through these and other means if they’re willing to move outside the box in which they were born. With a mass expansion of identity we can collectively create a better world. Socrates would be proud of us all.
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Ronald Bell
March 12, 2018 at 5:29 pm
Thank you for your good thoughts!
I suspect that there is “something” within (similar perhaps to the several “selves” we each are said to have/be) that pushes and pulls us toward differing people, places and things at differing times or stages of becoming in our life journeys. I recall someone once saying something like: “You won’t discover Paris unless you take it with you.”
At essence and core, I think each of us is vast with actual and potential permeable borders.
You are a citizen of the world.
A “citizen of the world” is not someone solely well-traveled; it is someone well-visioned, who has trekked from “me” to “we”, from ethnocentricity to world-centricity, who sees self as member of a family beyond borders and boundaries of race, religion, class, gender, and geography. A world citizen carries a passport stamped with individual and universal fingerprints of inclusive love, mutual regard, belonging and active caring for our commons and “all our relations” (“Matakuye Oyasin”). The citizen of the world passport is carried in one’s heart, soul and spirit – it transforms barriers into bridges.
Love, peace and justice,
Ron Bell