You can totally kick the can down the road, but that’s not what makes us so different. When I was a kid, I used to think of my parents as the “family.” I thought of them as my friends, because I wanted to see them more often. I would say they were a little bit like me, all the time. When I was around, I would go out to the backyard with my friends to throw a party. That was it.
So when you were little, and you would go out into the yard and play, what did you think you were doing? You weren’t really playing, you were actually just pretending.
Now that we’ve got more than a dozen party-lovers in the world, what makes you different? My parents were all very happy about what they were eating, my friends were a little bit upset about that. But some of the other characters were just happy to see what we were doing. And it’s not just my friends who are happy to see me.
There is a difference between pretending and actually playing, and that difference is in our minds. We can tell we are playing, because we’re in the right place, we’re using the right thing to do it. And yet we’re not playing in reality.
I don’t know how else to describe it. We’re not in the right place. We’re not using the right thing. We were pretending in reality, but pretending in the wrong way. We are not in the right place. We are not playing in reality. And this is the kind of self-awareness that takes a long time to develop.
Self-awareness isn’t necessarily a “thing,” but it’s something that a lot of people have in spades. It goes beyond just thinking of ourselves as “us” or “we.” We all have different ways of being self-aware that range from talking more, planning out our day, and making a list of our goals, to watching self-reflection videos like this one. The key to self-awareness is that we have to recognize our own ways of being self-aware.
I think one of the best ways to develop self-awareness is to do something that you’ve never done before. For example, I am currently the only person in my entire house who wears a hat. I get it that this is boring and I’m probably going to get called out, but it’s nice to be reminded that I’m the only person in my entire house wearing a hat.
So this week we’re going to be doing a self-reflective video. In it I’ll go over some of my beliefs from when I was a kid, as well as some things I think I’ve become. I’ll also try to share some things I’ve learned since I was 13. I think it’s fun and I think it might help other people realize that there are things they can do to make themselves more aware and more self-aware.
I think it’s always fun to get a chance to share our own thoughts and beliefs. One thing I definitely don’t do enough is try to justify anything we do, or to try to convince others that what we do is right. There are so many other things we can do that are good and that we should be doing, things that others could be doing, that we should be learning from, and that we should be teaching our kids.
That doesn’t mean we cant be open and free, or that we cant be honest about what we believe and that we can’t always get people to like us for it. It means that we have to make sure that we are conscious of the fact that we are doing things that are good for our own well-being. To me, this is very much like the “good news” and “bad news” that we share with each other.