We readily ask, “Who am I?”, hoping with this question to make sense of our own identity. But is this actually a misleading question? One that creates for us as many problems as it attempts to solve and creates much pain on the way.
The questions we choose to ask define the path our thinking will take and the sort of things that we are likely to discover.
Maybe there are more useful questions to ask of ourselves than “Who am I?”.
What happens when we ask instead, “What am I?”. What do we discover about ourselves then? What flight of inquiry do we launch out on?
Or maybe, “How am I?”. Not in the sense of, how am I feeling? But rather in “How do I happen?” What processes and patterns are at work to cause me to show up in the world as I do? “How does the event that is me create itself?”.
These two questions, “What” and “How”, take us on a very different path towards getting some useful insights into how we experience our life.
Asking “Who am I?” just takes us down a rabbit hole. “What” and “How” have the potential to take us out into some wild and interesting places.
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