‘So what do you do?’
‘What are you studying?’
‘Where did you come from?’
‘What’s your style?’
People love asking these questions.
They help to tell us a little about certain parts of you, and paint a clearer picture of your identity.
What people really want to know is, what groups are you a part of, and what’s your status.
When faced with these questions we feel like we should have a clear and well-prepared answer on hand, otherwise, we risk looking like we don’t belong to any group, haven’t got a plan, or haven’t achieved ‘something’.
But today you might be doing a job, studying something, achieving something and performing a role, tomorrow, that changes.
And then what?
These shifts in ‘identity’ happen many times throughout life. In fact, they happen from day to day, moment to moment. Your identity is constantly changing.
That’s why these are really silly questions because they focus on a past or future, or some defined identity, rather than what actually is.
When Bruce Lee was asked in an interview whether he thought of himself as Chinese or American, he responded by saying.
“Do you know how I like to think of myself? As a human being.”
He didn’t identify with any particular style or identity in any of the things he did.
He could have been an American actor, a Chinese martial artist, a philosopher, a teacher, a father or anything else people wanted to identify him as.
Instead, what made him so unique, and able to transcend eastern and western culture to this day- was that he had no style but his own. No identity that anyone else put onto him but what he expressed.
His approach was to scratch away at the things that life projects onto us; what we do, where we’ve been, what we’ve accomplished, and be comfortable expressing what is. “We are what we are.”
Your style is unique to you. It can’t be replicated or put in a box. Be comfortable in having no style.
