Awareness

In reviewing my journaling on my Word of the Year (“Awareness”) this month I came across this quote from Eric Hoffer: “To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.”  A few pages over I have this written in quotation marks (though, unfortunately, with no attribution): “…we differ in what we do or don’t do…not in what we are.”

Merging those thoughts, once we “have some awareness of what we are” we recognize that “we differ in what we do or don’t do…not in what we are.” That as we each seek to determine what we are, we come face to face with the reality that we are the same.  In this I am reminded of the line from John McCutcheon’s timeless Christmas classic (though not of the jolly mold), Christmas in the Trenches – “on each end of the rifle, we’re the same.”