Tuesday, December 5, 2017

Who We Are

I've been reflecting lately.
I believe that some parts of who we are have been there inside of us before we even knew it ourselves. 

I've been sneaking sips of coffee since I was a toddler and coffee is one of my favorite drinks. 
I've had an intense fascination wish other cultures, beliefs, and religions since I was a child and it hasn't stopped. 
When I learned about Hanukkah I insisted on getting a little plastic battery operated menorah. I don't remember this, my mother told me about it a little over a year ago when I was talking to her about Judaism.
When I was little I tried to knit pieces of yarn with pencils for knitting needles, despite everyone in my life being crocheters and living in a house full of crochet hooks. I learned recently that knitting comes naturally to me. 

When I was 5 or 6 years old I decided that I was never going to love anyone else the way that I loved the little boy who rode the same bus and lived just down the road. I wanted to marry him, and years later I did.
When I was little I loved thrift shops and antique stores. I always found something that I thought was curious and unique and wanted to bring home. I'm still a collector of unique things. I get so excited at amazing things that could have been lost with time and dust.
I've always loved jelly donuts, the smell of rain, the way new baby cows look curiously around at the new world they're in almost as though they remember being in their mother's wombs more clearly.
The childish wonder of a vivid rainbow has never faded.
I enjoy the smell of warm milk but not the taste and maybe in another 30 years I'll enjoy the taste and think in wonder at how I must have known deep down all this time, but that part of who I am was not yet ready to be.


With some things we just are who we are I think. 
Who we are is who we were before we realized we were old enough to be anything yet.

I'm not sure if we enjoy things so much that they become characteristics or if our, perhaps god-given, ingrained characteristics guide us and shape us into the passions and greatest loves of our lives and who we are ultimately seen as by ourselves and everyone else.





2 comments: