What Makes Me "Me" and You "You? Thoughts On Identity

Have you ever wondered at the uniqueness that is each one of us? What makes me "me" and you "you"? Our identity is the heart of who we are and that which makes us unique. Are our beliefs and what we value randomly influenced by what we encounter growing up, or is our make up largely in place and unlocked by the encounters we have, especially in childhood?

I thought recently about how I have always been drawn to nature. To wildlife. As a child I read all I could about different types of animals. I knew so many of them, their names, facts. I also read about the people who were involved with conserving nature, people like Jane Goodall and Dianne Fossey and the breakthrough research they were doing with chimpanzees and mountain gorillas. Joy and George Adamson and their book called "Born Free" about lions. "Solo: the Story of an African Wild Dog", a little pup I think was the runt of the litter, deformed by rickets, but helped along his way by people and set free to live his life out in wild open spaces. Tarzan fascinated me, a boy lost in the jungle and nurtured by great apes, but who still retained his humanness and found society again.

My love for nature will never go away. I love mountains and streams and blue open skies and rainforests. Watching an impala, chancing upon a hyaena nursing her cubs, seeing a herd of springbuck pronking their dance of joy, watching an echidna inch its way up a small hill. It is the most exhilarating experience waking up at the crack of dawn, still asleep and stumbling around in the half dark, grabbing my camera, and dashing to my car and driving out into the light of the rising African dawn, hoping to capture the moments unfolding around me. Or to walk through a forest, trees rising majestically all around, hearing birds, smelling leaves, being slightly drenched by fine drizzle. Why do I enjoy marvelling at nature so much? It wasn't so much that I experienced nature on holiday with my family as a child, except in some rare moments like splashing around in rock pools at the sea and watching the myriad of tiny fishes, or taking a little walk through trees, or a quick drive through a nature reserve, but those moments I treasured. Holidays with my family meant the beach. I hated sitting on the beach for hours on end. Swimming in the sea has its moments, but I wanted short moments only! What joy is there in lying in gritty sand, getting it all over my body, washing it off in the ocean, and then trudging back over the sand and getting mud splattered legs and coated sandy feet? Lying for hours under a burning sun? But others love the beach and the sea and can spend a whole day there! For me the fun is in watching the ocean, marvelling at the way the waves pound rocks as they have done for time beyond measure, watching the sun glint off the water in a sparkling dance, and smelling the smell of a clean sea.

My love for nature is just one example of the way I might be different to someone else. There are so many differences in each of us: our thoughts, values, ethics, dreams, hobbies, careers. The things I see that you don't see, things you see that I don't, the way we each understand things. Isn't it wonderful to know we are all unique?! And perhaps a lesson in this is to uncover those parts of our identities we know are there but may have been ignoring, the things that make our souls sparkle. Writing about nature touched a chord in my heart I had almost forgotten, yet is something so fundamental to my makeup and what I value. Know what you love and what you stand for. Know your identity.