Life expresses through us.

Do we express life? Or does life express through us?

I think it’s the latter. I think we are like filters.

At the very core, we are little blank canvases of consciousness. We are born with a certain set of personalities influenced by our genes and environment, then we get exposed to different upbringings and cultures, then to the society.

Little by little, we fill our canvases with personality, likes, dislikes, and qualities we work on. And that’s how the individual art pieces (us) are formed. Art pieces that constantly change according to what they’re exposed to.

In other words, we take in what life offers to us, and select what we want to keep on the canvas. Except the selection is not conscious, it’s guided by subconscious conditioning and preferences. We all know how thoughts and feelings “pop” into our heads. We never know what our next thought or feeling would be.

That’s not to say that we don’t have any control over our choices. We have a say when we become conscious about the process. We all have a bunch of thoughts and feelings in our minds at a given moment, and we don’t express all of them. We choose some of them to express, based on our conditioning, personality, preference and how we want to appear to others.

That’s why I think life expresses through us.

It may sound disappointing, since the tendency is to think that we are who we are because of our own actions or efforts – I shaped myself to be this way. But how much of it can we call our own? Even original ideas are simply variation of ideas that already existed in some ways. As much as we all want to be unique individuals with our very own original ideas and special stories, we are “products” of life.

That’s a liberating thought, because it takes the “me” out of the equation. We’re never separate. Instead, we’re all part of a whole – the creation. We are unique expressions of what the creation is according to our different sets of personalities and experience. Art pieces of life. So what is there to compare or to compete? What is there to dislike or improve?

Isn’t that beautiful?

We share the same core of consciousness. It’s only the expression that is different.