Someone once said to me, “were a mix of all ages at all stages of life.” This makes a lot of sense to me. As we grow we learn to be more comfortable with certain aspects of ourselves, yet with this “wisdom” comes more questions. Oftentimes when I really feel like I finally am able to step back and realize more the patterns in my thinking and reactions, I feel older in terms of my new awareness, yet adolescent in the sense that this new awareness is very new to me. I can look around with a new perspective and find people who relate to the awareness as if they known the things I just realized for a long time.

I heard tonight another person say, with respect to giving advice, “everyone has already gone through what you have.” To which I added, “we all figure it out for ourselves in the end.” While we may be able to speak of similar realizations, the way we get to them is distinct and specific. It is easy to get caught up in thinking someone else believes the same thing or thinks the way you do because your experience has been quite similar, and just as easy to realize you have come to the same conclusion as another who you find to be quite different from yourself.

I have been realizing that at certain points of breakthrough in my development (or realization of growth), I recall many things that I heard someone say in the past; things that either confused me at the time, or I dismissed as something I wasn’t interested in. I think there is something to be said for the ‘human experience’ in terms of understanding the same truths in different ways, depending on our views and experience on this earth. I wonder if we all learn the same lessons and come to the same realizations, in different manifestations.

Another way to look at this is if you try hard enough you can see a piece of yourself in every person you meet, whether this be in relation to how others react to something, or finding similarities in stories of personal journeys. This is a beautiful mental model to think that we are all united by our eerily similar qualities, despite our differences, especially if you think of it aesthetically: like seeing many mirrors of yourself all around you. Sometimes it happens in reverse, where you question why someone is acting the way they are, only to realize later that you find yourself acting in a similar manner. How many times have you heard someone question the way another is and thought to yourself, ‘but that is an exact quality I see in you’ ? Uniqueness is present with each individual. But, if you look closely, and draw parallels as well as metaphors, there is a way to connect everyone by comparison or conversely by distinct contrast.

Another way to say this is there could not be sameness without difference. It is these two things that appear to be independent, when in reality, require the each other to exist.