“Summarize Yourself”

While reading a fiction book from the library, one of the book’s secondary characters, a gifted but older, acerbic author asked the main female protagonist some penetrating personal questions. She was the local academic community’s phenomenon—a young, doctoral-physic’s ‘coding’ genius who was attempting to computationally define the prime equation string for high-temperature super-conductivity. In the book the writer was depicted as aloof in general but seemed more peripherally interested in her as character study to scavenge her emotional reactions (or lack thereof) and her more prominent personality traits as creative fodder for his newest novel currently underway.

For her part having been somewhat socially repressed to date, she had found him intellectually and philosophically stimulating to discuss more pithy subjects, until he cavalierly stated something a bit condescending to her along the lines of “I don’t know you well, so summarize yourself for me.”

While she had previously courted his erudite attention for validation, she now recognized the shallowness of his interest in her as intrusive and parasitically-motivated, so she walked out of the scene without responding to him; but what he said to her stuck in my head: “… summarize yourself for me.”

I thought, ‘How would I summarize myself;…or  even describe who AM I in summary just to myself, NOT to someone else?’

Think about it a bit. Out of the blue someone says to you: “Summarize yourself.”  What would you say? (Besides telling them where to put it and walking off also, which I would totally do.)

In truth ‘summarizing ourselves’ is a complex task for anyone because we are seldom who we think we are, and less sure how others actually see us if we did describe ourselves a certain way. Do you really KNOW yourself well enough to even attempt a summary? This task made me contemplate my actual self-awareness.

How about if you simply desired to ‘summarize yourself’ to you alone? Can you do that?

• Are you WHAT you do?
• Are you WHAT you wish to be?
• Are you the sum total of all you have experienced and felt to date—a running chronology of all your successes, failures, attempts, passes, from childhood onwards and how each of them affected you for better or for worse?
• Can you trace your ‘awareness’ evolvement?
• Are you now living your highest aspirations for purpose and significance to the world around you, or are you primarily passing time waiting for the Great Unknown to acknowledge you?
• Are you a ‘good’ person by your own standards, or a ‘not so good’ one? What makes the difference? What’s the defining criteria for each? Can you be both some of one and some of the other?
• Is this consideration part of that Doing/Being conundrum?  Are you what you ‘DO’ in life, or are you simply as you ‘BE’—a soul incarnated?

After pondering this ‘self-summary’ challenge for awhile, I finally just let my mind quiet until it began to drift away—slowly riding the oceanic waves of consciousness.  What I then heard clearly between my ears was, “I am a seeker.” 

It’s from the Hermann Hesse quote,

“I have been and still am a ‘seeker,’ but I have ceased to question the stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.”

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I agree with Hesse. That’s a pretty close summary of WHO I am also:  “I am a seeker” of truth and knowledge. I am a ‘collector’ of other’s wisdom and experiences. I am an incarnate ‘sensor’ for Higher Consciousness in the NOW as I know it.

I am, as Alan Watts claimed, but ‘a wave in the universal ocean’: 

“You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.” – Alan Watts.

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So what’s your self-summary?