The downside of being a consumate thinker is having this rub off on your children and then, the horror, encouraging such conversation. My son has a tendency to ask philosophical questions minutes before going to bed, most likely as a stall tactic, that are quite profound for someone his age. The challenge is responding in a way that is appropriate, while also telling him to go to bed already.

Recently, he was inquiring into what makes us who we are and why we’re different now than yesterday.
In essence, he was asking the epistemological question of what identity means. If thousands of years of philosophical and theological thinking isn’t going to give a solid answer, what can we really say about this subject?

Rather than wax poetic about the Buddhist idea that the self doesn’t exist, the Christian concept the self is ordained by God or the existentialists who claim we create our own identity, I think it’s fair to say we haven’t really met ourselves yet.

We meet other people who tell us about ourselves and we internalize these ideas and project them back, but to actually leave ourselves to see us for who we are is beyond what we’re capable of in his life. It’s the equivalent to stepping outside the universe to observe what the universe is without our human bias.

Until we can finally meet ourselves for who we are, we are better off accepting the avatar we’ve created. The good news is because we’ve created this identity, we don’t have to be committed to it if it no longer serves us.