THE AUTHENTIC SELF
Do you have kids?Then you know that not one of them popped out as
tabula rasa, a blank slate. Each came into this world with a
distinct and unique personality, an identity so set that you can
fling Stardust and great balls of fire at it and not morph it by
one micro-dot. Each kid was who he was. Even identical
twins, constituted of the exact same genetic material,
were radically different from Day One and always would be.
Personally I'm with Wordsworth:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God who is our home.In other words, none of us are born as passive genericSTEVEN PRESSFIELD