WHO ARE YOU?
Yes, but who are you really?
You are a wholly unique human being born into, and a product of, the fundamental influencing factors listed. Even though they may seem to limit you, you are ‘this’ generations iteration of a person with the criteria listed here.
We each like to think that we’re the captain of our own ship, the Zen master of our own dojo, and the director of our own movie. Most of us want to be independent, to think for ourselves, and develop our minds as we see fit. But how unique are you really? How different are your experiences than anyone else’s? If you are ‘one in a million’, that still means there are 8000 people in the world pretty much exactly like you. They may live under a different political system, speak another language, or they may be at another level in their quest to be themselves.
Some things are, within reason, ubiquitous to us all. We’re human beings. We all have belly buttons. We all eat, blink, and shit. Everyone breathes, grows, and digests. The cells in our body all die and are replaced. The body's cells largely replace themselves every 7 to 10 years. In other words, old cells mostly die and are replaced by new ones during this time span.
Your body exists for a few reasons. A healthy human has many organs all complimenting each other, and they ensure that the heart beats and the brain processes. These appear to exist to keep one alive and thinking. Beyond that, we are meant to move on our feet and grasp things with our hands. So, if the heart keeps beating, our brain continues to think, and it moves our physical bodies around. Our head detects all five senses: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin are the organs used in seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and feeling. So our head seems to be a consistently important part of who we are.
While thinking and moving around, we are subject to events, emotions, and experiences to which we apply our five senses to investigate, deduce, contemplate, accept, and solve. Like maybe if a berry is poisonous, if you’re being cheated on by your spouse, or whether seeing a sequel is worth the last bit of your hard-earned money.
Biodiversity refers to every living thing, including plants, bacteria, animals, and humans. Scientists have estimated that there are around 8.7 million species of plants and animals in existence. Medical News Today says there are about 72 genders to identify with. There exist 41 musical genres to explore and 28 styles of dancing. There are 136 narcotics one can introduce to the body and four types of alcoholic beverages: beer, wine, spirits, and liqueurs. There over 12,000 jobs or careers to choose from.
We all have a memory bank inside our brains, and the average adult human brain can store the equivalent of 2.5 million gigabytes of digital memory. We speak one or more of the 7100 languages in the world and participate in 3800 cultures. There are 250,000 to 300,000 species of edible plants. There are 65,000 living species of fish, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and birds and we can hunt, trap, or fish and then eat them.
An international research effort called the Human Genome Project, which worked to determine the sequence of the human genome and identify the genes that it contains, estimated that humans have between 20,000 and 25,000 genes. There are 86 billion neurons inside your head, connecting memories, positing thoughts, and weighing decisions.
According to science, there are 27 human emotions, and we live within a web of tangled bits of them. They are admiration, adoration, aesthetic appreciation, amusement, anger, anxiety, awe, awkwardness, boredom, calmness, confusion, craving, disgust, empathic pain, entrancement, excitement, fear, horror, interest, joy, nostalgia, relief, romance, sadness, satisfaction, sexual desire, and surprise.
There are some 14 reactive ingredients or states of "being" like mental impairments, drunkenness, drugs, tiredness, neural capacities, time limits, illnesses, general disbelief, disbelief due to previous influences, harmony, meditation, and sicknesses that will inflate or constrict a wider sense of these emotions.
There are seven ways of thinking about things, Critical Thinking, Analytical Thinking, Creative Thinking, Abstract Thinking, Concrete Thinking, Convergent Thinking, and Divergent Thinking.
We have 43 facial muscles that can display over 10,000 different expressions. There are 143 different skin tones and 12 types of hair which can be modified into over 1200 styles. Blondes have about 120,000 hairs on their heads, brunettes 150,000 and redheads about 90,000.
In our experiences of life, there are six categories of experiences:
o 1. Physical experience
o 2. Mental experience
o 3. Emotional experience
o 4. Spiritual experience
o 5. Social experience
o 6. Virtual experience
These fall into 47 types of human experiences: Adulthood, Aesthetics, Aging, Belief, Birth, Change, Childhood, Community, Competition, Conflict, Constraint, Creativity, Culture, Destruction, Emotion, Empathy, Failure, Family, Fear, Freedom, Friendship, Happiness, Hate, Imagination, Joy, Learning, Logic, Mortality, Motivation, Nature, Physical, Play, Privacy, Problems, Rational thought, Rest, Self-fulfillment, Sense, Sickness, Society, Space, Spirituality, Spontaneity, Success, Time, Virtual experience, and Work.
Where we move our body and how we move it are done in our country one of the 195 that currently exist, and often how much freedom you have is due, is according to the political environment you live in. We can live in one (or more) of ten political types: Democracy, Communism, Socialism, Oligarchy, Aristocracy, Monarchy, Theocracy, Colonialism, Totalitarianism, and Military Dictatorship.
In conjunction with our country, or nationality, it may be congruent with a belief system like religion. The 12 major religions include Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Taoism, Judaism, Confucianism, Bahá'í, Shinto, Jainism, and Zoroastrianism.
But there are over also over 4,000 recognized religions in the world today consisting of churches, congregations, faith groups, tribes, healing centers, cultures, and movements. And other people, self-seekers, who are confused over being organized or limited with any of these, often believe in elements of two or more, often conflicting, religions. There are varying shades of agnostics.
There are 10 classifications of disabilities. They are: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Learning Disabilities, Mobility Disabilities, Medical Disabilities, Psychiatric Disabilities, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Visual Impairments, Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Concussion and Autism Spectrum Disorders.
These form the 21 types of disabilities. They are Blindness, Low-vision, Leprosy Cured persons, Hearing Impairment (deaf and hard of hearing), Locomotor Disability, Dwarfism, Intellectual Disability, Mental Illness, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Cerebral Palsy, Muscular Dystrophy, Chronic Neurological conditions, Specific Learning Disabilities, Multiple Sclerosis, Speech and Language disability, Thalassemia, Hemophilia, Sickle Cell disease, Multiple Disabilities including deaf/blindness, Acid Attack victim, and Parkinson's disease.
There are also 16 different attributes that make you unique. They are genetics, physical characteristics, personality, attitude, perspective, habits, intellect, goals, experience, relationships, creativity, passion, communication, humor, taste, and travel.
This brings me back to our everyman/everywoman wishing to be seen as the captain of our own ship: we stand at the helm with good intentions overruled by the above factors; we wish to be the Zen master of our own dojo yet the times we contemplate exactly that are compromised/enhanced/influenced by physical changes beyond our control; we wish to be seen as the director in our own movie, but are actually bit players.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chordate
https://nationaldaycalendar.com/world-religion-day-third-sunday-in-january
https://www.amazon.com/Major-World-Religions-TraditionsInfluential/dp/1623156920
https://ca.edubirdie.com/blog/common-forms-of-government-study-starters
https://simplicable.com/new/human-experience
https://www.verywellmind.com/an-overview-of-the-types-of-emotions
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_many_different_human_emotions_are_there
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/biodiversity
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/types-of-gender-identity
https://www.cnsnevada.com/what-is-the-memory-capacity-of-a-human-brain
https://blog.busuu.com/most-spoken-languages-in-the-world
https://isaccurate.com/blog/cultures-around-the-world
https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/basics/gene
https://audiophilereview.com/audiophile/how-many-music-genres-do-we-need
https://www.careerplanner.com/ListOfCareers.cfm
https://www.ancestry.com/lp/traits/skinpigmentatio
http://samagrashiksha.hp.gov.in/Application//content/disabilities.pdf
https://www.minimalismmadesimple.com/home/unique-person
https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/cellular-microscopic/does-body-really-replace-seven-years.htm
Images:
Verywellmind.com (neuron)
New York Post (triplets)
Cornerstone Urgent Care (x-ray)
AZquotes.com (quote)
Gary Larson/The Far Side (cartoon)
OF RUSSIA: A Year Inside
Brent Antonson has seen a Russia few foreigners have. Indeed, few Russians. This young Canadian ventured to Voronezh, eleven hours south of Moscow by train, to spend a year inside a country torn by strife, fresh into a new century, and struggling with the clash between history and future. Tasked with teaching English to students at one university, and then a second, his story is riddled with romance and deception, and punctuated with near disaster and disappointment. Antonson's candour and insights set Russia on the edge of failure and achievement – much like the students he educated, filled with a dash of hope and a lump of fear. His wit did as much to get him in trouble as it did to keep him out of it.
