Self, ones worst enemy and only friend.

Subject: Self, ones worst enemy and only friend

One of our problems in life is our need for recognition. It's an innate need based on our own home grown desire to be valued by others much as we value our self. It's as if our own recognition of who we are and what we stand for is insufficient and has to be recognised by others.
This self aggrandisement, the enlargement or magnification of our personality leads us into many battles as we pursue our right to think and express who we are. It leads us into argument and acts of self-flagellation defending the indefendable, of saying things we know are not right just for the sake of winning the argument.
Our interpretation of the world around us is very personal, full of prejudice and mistaken assumptions. That's not to say these assumptions are not valid only that their validity is very much one off and individualistic. The assumption that the person you are standing with has the faintest idea what you think or value, that their prejudice is the same as yours, that the language you use whilst being grammatically correct is understood by them, that the emphasis you place on the words you use comes from your own unique vocabulary based on your own experiences and that any colour you bring to your description, is based on a lifetime not only a day. As we fervently try to describe our impressions or our feelings, we are in most instances hollowing into the dark since what we say is nuanced in so many ways.
If heaven help us, our emotions are brought into play we distanced  ourselves even further from the listener. We assume they are still listening but soon realise that for much of the time we are alone with our thoughts, unable to share, shipwrecked in our own dreams on an island of our own making.
Of course much of what we say and do is mundane and mechanistic. It's a code for getting through the day, the greeting, the well wishing, the expression of concern each is momentarily significant but for most people only a lingua franca for getting by and moving on. Locked in our own world we often have little or no time for others. Our own self importance trashes what little commonality we might have for the person in the street.
The church service or the football match, the concert or a march pass of veterans on Armistice Day, these gatherings can garner some sort of collective spirit, focusing the mind on a specific but generally we walk around in our own world oblivious of others.
It's a shame since there is so much rough hewn, common experience but it's our interpretation of the experience which sets us apart, sometimes at each other's throat.
In essence of course we all travel down much the same road from birth until death.
A person growing up in China or Bangladesh, Europe or South America have much the same desires but the local culture melds our perception and gets in the way to distort the outcome. Only babies are untouched, each one affected by a few common things such as hunger and a mothers love. The rest of their journey might be described as chaotic with scattered showers and the occasional bit of sunshine.
The assembly of our personality, of who we are, is an amalgam of day to day, minute by minute exposure to events and it's our interpretation of those events which makes us the isolated personality we often become.