Dear LPG readers,

I tend to wander through older postings on this sight because of the diversity of subject matter to be found, and I recently found a perplexing message which questioned, well, the ultimate question, ‘Why’ (►►►).  

In the post, the question was asked yet again, and still no conclusive answer was found, but it got me thinking about another question which might be as challenging. 

I want to ask readers another question which I think is pretty hard to answer but which we each might need to be able to make the occasional attempt to have a go at.  The question, ‘Why’ is just too big but, ‘Who are you’ is a question that can be answered on many different levels…

We don’t even wait to be asked a lot of the time.  We meet someone for the first time and we often assume that after ‘Hello’ it will be the next question before we launch into our personal self-prepared routine.     

Going down the expressive route of describing ourselves is the easiest way to make sure that the real fundamentals of such an enquiry are satisfied.   Name, age, gender, marital status, where we live, how many children we have, what we used to work at, our favourite hobby and our most outstanding achievement will usually suffice as an answer, but perhaps a more challenging version of that question is pretty universal and unanswerable in its own right.  

We all have our own personal answer to the question of who we are, but if you were asked the question, ‘Who are you really. What makes you you?’  We have another deep, difficult to answer quintessentially challenging question that might cause us to question the question.  

I thought that I would ask a few of my friends but I did not get very far.  Most of the people I asked dodged the question altogether or stayed with the whole personal description answer I mentioned earlier, so I thought I would ask Google for an opinion and I found a few theories.  

I am not the first person to be provoked into trying to work it out, and I don’t know how we got to the topic, but one day not so long ago, it came up during a chat I was part of.   

We concluded that one way of looking at it involves pin-pointing the part of you that connects with everyone else.  A couple of us took the approach that, perhaps it is your mind that is really the most ‘you’ part of yourself while we also theorised that, when it comes to communication with the rest of the world around us, perhaps it is the parts of our bodies that provide the senses that we use to reason and communicate with; speech, touch, sight and, hearing.  But one person pointed out that when that is gone, the memory of our individuality remains and can be harnessed even more readily now that we can easily leave loads of videos and pictures behind us.   We decided that it was our essence or soul that has to be the most real bit of a person, but defining exactly what we mean when talking of essence left us with yet another question which needed questioning.  

The only thing that we agreed on was we were not only talking about what they smell, taste, look or sound like although that train of thought caused its own set of differences of opinion.  The conversation got so deep that, from there, one participant just changed the subject, but it surfaced again with me, later when I was home alone.

Still looking for answers, I decided that the internet might help and a quick search there produced some interestingly different theories.  I unearthed a few which I thought might be of interest to a few LPG readers.  

My final analysis that night left me with one conclusion in the end and I have no doubt that it will change and evolve as time goes by.  I have decided that questions can be answered on many different levels and perhaps we need to just stick with our own personal ‘basics’ if ever we are asked this one.  

CM, Grove Park.

CM offers a few versions of how the internet sees the answer…

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