We attach meanings, histories, worlds and stories to words. And, when these words are moved, the things that are attached to them move as well. This is particularly true of identity. The simple words that describe where we have chosen to anchor our selves, keeping us drifting, lost at sea in the collective consciousness, also determine our path. Even before we are what we identify as, we are already those who have chosen to gather around a certain category of identities. We are, for example, those who identify by labour before we are those who individually identify as doctors, lawyers, musicians, writers and such.
If this adds up then it isn’t more than a step to seeing how, even in our battles, we are gathered. As we differ, we differ amidst our similarities towards our differences. And because we are gathered as a herd of similarly fated selves it seems like the world of war is all that exists. This is, of course, exacerbated by confirmation bias and cyber bubbles that perpetuate us into spaces of similarity, commonality and polarity. Remember, engagement is the metric and, like the game of media has always been, the sensational sells. We hear this as a demonisation of the media, instead we should use it to recognise the demon within. Understand that, at the core of it, we are only invested in our fate. And the only people with whom we share a fate are those who have chosen to anchor their selves around a similar idea.
We are, of course(and maybe rightly so), attached to our selves, an attachment that reminds us not everything can be let go. As such, any wave, incidental or not, that stirs the waters where we have anchored our identities moves us with it. As we drift, dragged along by this undercurrent, we realise that we are no longer in control of our motion and respond.
It might then be of importance to remember that the tethers are, at the core of it, just words. And the attachments we may have made to particular words are not the same as the attachments others have made even if, strictly speaking, we may be speaking to the same meaning. In this way the world can be known and recognised as an unknowable, unrecognisable, transient sea of phenomena. Knowing this, perhaps we might realise that the real trouble started when we tethered our eternal selves to a form of a word, contextually defined. And, in being contextually defined, it is tied to a meaning from a time, brought violently into the now, dragging us along with it.