Washing My Knees

All of us have routines that we follow day-to-day. When I shower, there is a pattern I follow, an order to the products I use and the way I wash. I always start out with a bar of soap and suds-up my thighs, then my calves (bare with me here, we're going to stay in the realm of PG, I promise). But the other day, I decided to wash my knees. This was out of the ordinary, but as soon as I did it, I suddenly realized that for my entire life, I'd been neglecting to wash a part of my body that actually, probably accumulates a lot dirt. I mean, just about every day, at some point, I crawl around to do something. And now, for the rest of my life, I think I will wash my knees. My point is that often, we think we know how to do something, when in fact, we're just following our routine. And all of a sudden, we can have a revelation that actually changes our behavior, and it can happen at any age.

I've often heard people describe their early twenties as a journey of self-discover, as in, "I'm not getting married young because I need to find out who I am first." As a student of philosophy, allow me to poke some holes in that reasoning. The idea that you don't know who you are as a young person, presupposes that you were either created by God to be a certain way and have no control over it, or you are a product of DNA and upbringing and once you discover who you are, then you will be able to get to doing whatever it is that you were either made to do or are pre-inclined to do because of your genetic make-up and nurturing. I would say that while those other factors do indeed make up a portion of who you are, your physical make-up, personality traits and customs, you also have the ability to choose the kind of person you want to become. Rather than saying that you need to find out who you are, it would be better to say that you need to find out what kind of person you want to be.

The other thing, and the purpose of this post, is to say that people, throughout their lives, change. No person, who lives to be a ripe old age, dies the same person, with the same habits, patterns, and especially beliefs as they had when they were in their 20's. Now, some people may change much more or less than other people, but, like I described above when I decided to start washing my knees, if we live long enough, we will continue to make discoveries throughout life, because we are merely human, designed to live on a tiny planet and the universe is infinite.