Who are you?

Ok, that's the second time in as many days that I've been asked "Who Are You?"  I feel like I'm in Groundhog Day forced to listen to The Who's 1978 release of ... you guessed it "Who Are You" over and over again.

Ok, so apparently it's obvious to everyone else (well at least two people) but me that I haven't been myself lately.  Or at least the version of myself that everyone else recognizes, or has recognized for a while.  That lately I've been a bit off balance.  And that got me thinking (hey ... me thinking ... maybe I'm not that off balance after all): Why?  What gets us off balance?  What shakes us up so much that makes the room spin and gets us so tipsy that we can't walk straight?

Maybe its something that shakes our belief systems?  If that's true, then what exactly are our belief systems anyways? If our behaviors are just the physical representation of our emotions, and our personalities are just networks of behaviors then maybe our belief systems are the underlying opinions we have about our world that drive the whole darn thing.  So if something rocks your foundation, your beliefs, the table with which you have built your reality on, then yea ... maybe you're not you.

So maybe this is a change function.  If your beliefs are rocked hard enough, maybe you ARE transforming and you're not who you used to be. I've said before that

sometimes you need to kill who you are to become who you need to be

I know it seems like a harsh statement, but that's only because the outside world only notices the transition, not the new person you've become, because you're not there yet.

If your belief systems are just opinions you've built up about the world, these are opinions that have been colored by the past, by the comfort level of others, by old circumstances, by our internal critical monologues.  Just a set of opinions that can be rocked by an external shock (you know ... kids going off to college, the transition of a business, etc) or more powerfully by an internal realization.  A realization that what you once held as fact, as judgment, is only opinion.  An awakening to real truth ... damn that will definitely rock your world.

So here's my question: "What do you believe in so strongly that if you ALLOWED it to only be an opinion and not what you believe to be right or true, would rock your world so much that you'd be off balance?"  It's a tough question to answer honestly, but even the search for the answer might set the room spinning, and let's be honest, who doesn't want to be a little off balance every once in a while.

See you on the wire

-- Steven Cardinale