DO YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE?

"The world is doing its best, 

night and day,

 to make you everybody else."

 - E.E. Cummings

Try as we might not to be blinded by society’s prescriptions for happiness, 

we are still social creatures porous to the values of our peers.

We seem lost, myopic about the things we believe will complete us as human beings, habitually aspiring to the wrong things for the wrong reasons. 

We are beings profoundly different from what we imagine ourselves to be. 

The things we pursue most frantically are the least likely to give us lasting joy and contentment,

  “It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.”
― Sigmund Freud

 “I cannot cause light; the most I can do 

is try to put myself in the path of its beam."

- Annie Dillard

“No one can build you the bridge on which you,

 and only you, 

must cross the river of life.”

-  Nietzsche

You can't grasp the concept of the soul, of your psyche.

Like a dust mote or a ghost, 

it can only be seen out of the corner of your perception.  Looked for directly, it disappears.

Like happiness or contentment, it comes to you while you pursue a needful goal or easing another's pain.

 

What do you think is 

the path to self-awareness?