September 7^th 2009  Monday

Who am I and how can I become who I am today?

"Who am I?"   You don't need to be a philosopher to ask yourself this fundamental question from time to time. Different people, different cultures, different philosophies and different religions have different answers. I have no intention to elaborate on this profound philosophical theme. It is simply beyond my ability.

I have intention to elaborate on another question: " How can I become who I am today?" many middle-age people as my generation begin to review their life and wonder how we have become step by step who we are today. In this process, normally speaking, we have some pleasures and many regrets. We may explode many "if" : if I had gone to another university, if I had studied another specialty, if I had chosen another job, if I had married another spouse, if I had seized those opportunities and so on.

When I was in the university, I spent much time in reading Jean -Paul Sartre, a French philosopher. He created a new school of though called Existentialism. His main point can be summed up as " Our existence is determined by our choices."  According to him, our life, our fate are actually determined by our previous choices.

So, who we are today are virtually decided by what we have chosen to do up to now. Each day, we have to make many options, most of them are small and neglectable, few of them are important. The total amount of all these choices, small and big will determine where we will arrive and who we will become in the future.

Some of the decisive factors in our life are out of our own reach: we cannot chose our family, we cannot chose our parents, we cannot chose the city where we live in, but other crucial factors, we can chose by ourselves. For instance, we can chose our education, we can chose our job, our career, we can chose our spouse, we can chose our friends. We can chose our attitudes toward the life. We can chose to which extents we can make the necessary sacrifices in order to seize the opportunity.

In conclusion, each day, we have to make all kinds of small options. You should be totally aware that, these choices made by you will finally decide who we will become in the future. Don't let yourself regret in 5 or 10 years. Try to make a good choice today. And every small choice counts.