Explore Your Gut

Part One: Who am I❓

Who am I❓- is one question that when answered, provides for rich reflection. If we consider Child Development, we quickly see the stages of growth and perhaps relate them to our identities, or to the answer to – Who am I?

📌For instance, infants respond to the 5 senses as a way to receive and give communication. A child listens, babbles, looks, touches and smells its immediate surrounding and responds to it.

📌Ever watched a 2year old hard at work? Well most of the time, they will be imitating, not the children, but the adults in their lives. The ones that they can relate to. It is as though they are attaching meaning to those associations.

📌Then there was that age that I remember oh so well. The age of why? It is as though the child is seeking for a deeper understanding of everything. As though they are seeking to define themselves against the environment that they are in. Making sense of the meaning that they attached earlier.

📌By the time they are of school going age, and exposed to the external world without their guardians hovering around, that is, the children develop internal dialogue, and there-in start to form preferences. Friends, places, experiences and so on, begin to set and form in a child’s life. Choice begins to be practiced.

This is a journey that we have all traversed.

I remember creating bonds by choice at the age of 10. Up until then, it kind of happened for me. But at the age of 10, there was a great shift in the life of my family. One that changed my environment and left a life behind for another.

Family values that I had been exposed to came to the fore, and I took them on as my identity. I set myself apart, sort of like my USP or maybe a better term would be DNA, or was it personal identity. I knew beyond reasonable doubt that this is who I was.