Perhaps it was the jet lag, perhaps it was serendipity, perhaps my mind has cleared but being in Vancouver I felt the need to write down, and share my thoughts on identity, self definition, and labels. I have also reflected on how we seem to be diverging as a society in so many different ways when arguably we have never been in a better place to converge to create a wonderful world irrespective of how we identify, define or label ourselves.
But I am getting ahead of myself and let me prefix all of this by saying that my need to communicate my thoughts has come from experiencing Vancouver - what seems to me to be a society that is proud of its diversity, values its multiculturalism, and confronts its problems.
If you have ever thought about it, by definition we are all unique. With the exception of identical twins we are all different from each other. Therefore, and by definition, we are all a minority of one and (and thisn’t WOKE philosophy at all) and deserve equal opportunity and respect - but something happens that gets in the way of this.
For me, I have struggled throughout my life to NOT allow my gender, race, nationality, sexuality, profession or economic standing (among others) define me. This is in part because in the early part of my life I struggle to ‘fit in’ to the stereo-typical definitions of the items in the list I just mentioned.
In later life I’ve come to terms with the ‘uniqueness’ definition I described earlier and am happy with this because since I gave up aspiring to the gender, race, nationality, sexuality blah blah blah sterotypical view and not requiring any form of label I am feeling great.
Recently, and because I had time I set up my own website www.peterfdew.com. On the landing page I decided to write a short definition of myself. Have a look if you like and although I didn’t realize it at the time I didn’t use any of the items on the ‘list’ to describe myself. On reflection there is one key word there though - Enigma - which I guess says everything about uniqueness.
And for sure I am not without fault, which in this context is bias I guess. I fight my conscious biases on a daily basis and as for my unconscious biases … well.
Food for thought.
Thank you Vancouver.