If you’re like me, you always struggle with your identity no matter how hard you try. Or until you change your approach, which I finally did.
“A bad beginning makes a bad ending” explains why I used to struggle with my identity. There is nothing new about it. Thanks to Euripides, we’ve known about it for 2,500 years.
For more time than I care to remember, that’s what I did. I began with a bad beginning.
I tried to link my identity to the place I was born, to my nationality, to my being human, or to the work I did, to name a few. With predictable results: My identities changed each time I came across a new idea.
Everything changed when I finally understood that only knowing the past will provide me with the a rock-solid identity that will last forever and a day.
That is where my knowledge of words comes in.
Words are 10,000 years older than stories. Practically speaking, that means words can to tell you more about our past than a story ever could.
The illustration below…
…tells us that as far as Earth’s past is concerned, it began with what we’re now calling nature.
Where was nature before we had a word for it, that is, before it existed?
Well, in the wordless world, nature doesn’t exist for self-evident reasons. However, from fossil finds and archaeological research, we know — in chronological order — that the cells, oxygen, plants, animals, eyes and brains, as well as the words, are are nature’s inventions, not ours.
Just as our ancestor who spoke the first word on Earth was nature’s child — presumably an animal of the homo type — so are we. We are part of nature, not separate from it.
When you understand the past, you will never struggle with your identity again. It will now be rock-solid and will out-live you.