I remember a time when I desperately wanted to be labelled “cool”. It is the only label that gets you into places. It is the only label that you want to be seen wearing, or holding. It gives you an all access pass to all the cool places with all the cool people. Slowly, I began to realise that being cool has such a wide meaning, it might as well have no meaning at all…
This realisation brought me to understand that as we grow up, labels do not grow. In fact, they shrink. Labels are a shortcut for us to put a definition on someone or something. You may be an artist, a writer, a teacher, a student, a philosopher, a mother, a Christian, a Jew, a spoilt brat, a conformer, a Tai Chi master… You might be seeking a journey within, a spiritual journey, enlightenment, career change, excitement, adventure, torture… All these are just labels.
As I grow older, I seem to be focusing on actions and doing away with labels. A person can easily be pigeonholed into the rich and famous, but the same person still has to eat and shit like the rest of us. He still faces the same family and relationship problems. He also has money issues even though he’s rich. In short, any label that we put on a person is always a sub-set of who he is. Most of the time, it’s a very small sub-set.
When you journey within yourselves, learn to see the truth from the labels. Labels help to filter part of the truth about yourself, but it cannot define the whole truth.
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