By Zaiti Athirah
Among those who are fans of Greek philosophy, the aphorism, “know thyself,” must’ve been too familiar. Yet how frequent have we found ourselves stifled by the very stark question, “Who am I?”
The thing about the fundamental human reality is that we all possess the crucial reflexive propensity – one imperative element that renders a man to make himself known to and by himself. Though, in the bustling cacophony of voices and distractions that drown out our inner thoughts, it’s easy for us to neglect the rudimentary reflection, to confront our contradictions and paradoxes, and to peer into the fragmented mosaic of our identities.
“Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?”
– Charles Bukowski
Is it the dread of confronting our fragility, or of the agony of excavating our elusivity, or of the risk of dissonance between perception and the reality – that has hindered most of us from truly examining ourselves? However so, such a meta-skill to have been dismayed, and such a privilege to have been taken for granted indeed…
Suppose that we have, by some way, perhaps by excessive hedonism, that we have duly forgotten the significance of the reflexive faculty, how shall we salvage it at all? I couldn’t help but notice that most writers are the most philosophical, most reflexive; or possibly I’ve just been lucky enough to have stumbled upon Joan Didion in “On Keeping a Notebook”:
“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about.”
In this prose, Didion proposed that we externalise our internal truths into words as she understood the transformative power of words and their ability to give shape to our amorphous emotions. Like Didion, we are all confronted with the elusive nature of our own recollections, the fallibility of our own personal narratives. And this is simply a way that compels us to question the veracity of our memories and examine the filters through which we perceive the world.
Some might even be dreaded by the nature of self-reflection, that it requires solitude or a meditative practice. I am thinking of that line in David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” Ground control to Major Tom – that mesmerically captures the disorienting and isolating aspects of introspection, to contemplate the transformative power and the potential risks inherent in the quest for self-reflection. There is apparently the paradoxical nature of self-reflection, where the deeper one delves into their inner world, the more they may insofar feel a sense of isolation from the external reality.
And thing is– , said Bowie to Didion, –can’t all foggy twisty feelings and notions be set forth so easily. More often than not, that we lack the words to name what we know, and the ordeal of silence is truly, absolutely, alienating. Is self-reflection, after all, worth the loneliness?
But self-discovery, that brings about self-clarity is truly a fair amalgam of being concomitantly lost and found. The act of pondering upon one’s own existence may entail instances of seclusion, yet one mustn’t forget that this journey is an ongoing cycle.
Should we find ourselves daunted by the hostility of self-reflection, that we’d rather choose ignorance and neglect, have we not realised our desuetude of truth, to have chosen self-deception and live hypocritically – have we disregarded the larger agony?
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