What is it that defines you?

Are you open, easily well-known, and multi-faceted? Or, are you known more at the surface level, keeping to the safe-feeling shadows like a one-dimensional silhouette?

We might define ourselves or others by something physical: size, shape, skin color, age, or the other typical things which might show up on an online dating profile.

How about try defining others or yourself by your actions or relations with others?

Pick one of the following words, and see how you might define yourself by them:

• Loving – are you expressing love and being loving to those near you?
• Empathic – do you listen to others deeply, without interruption, judgment, advice, or pulling things back into your own story?
• Shy – avoiding letting yourself be known, sitting against the wall, letting others make fools of themselves, or keeping the benches warm.
• Healthy – are you living a healthy lifestyle? Are there things you’re doing which help you feel better, or doing things which you know are bringing you down?
• Grateful – do you live life as a thank you? Are you able to easily find things you’re grateful for? Can you, and do you, easily express gratitude to others?

Maybe you don’t use any of these qualities to define yourself today.

If you’re finding it hard to define yourself using words like these, then you might find it easier to begin by defining someone you know instead of yourself. Consider how they behave and how they act as a way of defining them.

We are all alive and living, which means we are changing and dynamic. Even when we don’t feel as if we or others are changing, not defining ourselves or only defining ourselves by external aspects really misses the deeper sense of who we are by how we are living and interbeing with others.

In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for “finding himself.” If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning for his existence.

Thomas Merton