I’ve either said this or implied it many times and whether we want to acknowledge it or not – I/me is our favorite topic of discussion, overt or unspecified. Before you get huffy, it isn’t all that unusual… ‘I’ is what/who we know. We react to all the stimuli that we encounter from our frame of reference, our experience. How else could we react? The reason is understandable – we all need to make sense of what is happening around us, even if we decide not to do anything with the information.
If this sounds selfish, the focus on ‘I’, why? Isn’t it ‘better’ to acknowledge this, at least to oneself, in order to realize? And in this acknowledgement isn’t this placing the necessary ‘restraint’ in order to look out and realize others are doing the same thing and their seeing may not be our seeing? My point is that this is natural, the problem lies in only looking at life from your own perspective and obsessing on only what it is you need/want/expect/think. Like it or not, you don’t live in a vacuum and your view may not be someone else’s.
Actually, I would argue that accepting your own ‘perspective’ gives the opportunity to view other’s views in a nonthreatening context. I believe that ‘problems’ arise when we don’t feel that our opinion is valued and heard. Sometimes the issue isn’t as much having the prevailing opinion as it is having your opinion acknowledged. Selfish? No. I think it is an issue of being acknowledged and valued. I think that you can be obsessive about too little attention as you can by too much.
Knowing that I, me is my favorite topic also allows me to order my world. To know and understand how various ideas, people, etc. relate and interrelate gives me the opportunity to give myself a consistency of behavior. As long as I realize and accept this and don’t try to impose my system on others, then there is a coexistent reality with others. Also, this gives me the opportunity to learn new ideas and approaches without the ‘fear’ of having my particular viewpoint ridiculed. ‘I’ is what I know, and now I’m able to discover your ‘I’.
…but, what do you think?
