I'm asking in relation to a college project based on identity and how significant moments shape who we are. I am collecting anonymous answers and hope to use them in my final piece. Thank you for your time and help!
Can you name a turning point in your life that changed who you are?
The birth of my only child turned my life completely around. When my daughter was born, and I looked at her, I realized I was solely responsible for her care and well-being (single mom). I knew that everything I did and said from that point on would either help her or hurt her. No longer could I frolic about, carefree, enjoying life as I wished at my leisure. I knew I had to get my act together quick as another life was depending on me. Some parts of life became more difficult from that point on as I had no finances to fall back on, and never received any kind of child-support. But the changes were all for the good in the long run, and I now look back on that day as the happiest day of my life. When I see pictures of me before she was born, it's almost as if I'm looking at someone else. I can't imagine my life without her in it.
Can you name a turning point in your life that changed who you are?
Im not sure if this is a kind of answer you're looking for, but when I moved classes back in secondary school, I changed my group of mates and lost contact with (most of) my old primary school friends which I had grown up with. I changed a lot when I met them, and I haven't changed back since :)
Yes, there was one specific defining moment. It was the moment that I realized, that God and I are ONE BEING. In fact, I had been reading a certain book about the relationship between God and all of us, I went to lunch one day and getting out of my car just outside the restaurant, it HIT ME! Like a ton of bricks. That one thought, changed my life irrevocably. Life has never been the same for me since. I now know who and what I really AM. I am still thinking about it 10 years later, because once you know this fact about yourself, that is when the discovery starts. That is when a never ending conversation begins. It never ends and you can never EVER go back to what you once believed in. For me, it is the single most important fact of my life, a life shaking event. When I realized what it meant - I was so stunned, I couldn't take it all in. All I can tell you now is, that it has changed my life in unbelievable ways and I continue on a daily journey with God in me, a part of my constant thinking, almost obsessive conversation with God. I don't have all the answers. I am not sure about everything. But the one thing I am CRYSTAL CLEAR about, is that God and I are ONE and INDIVISABLE Being.
well its not really a point, its more like a turn in the road
before eigth grade i was basically a stereotypycal teenage boy. played sports and didnt like anybody who didnt think like me. but when i was in eigth grade (art class) i started sort of...debating things with a non conformist kid. i still don't agree with a lot of his philosophies, but i came out of that year with a totally different veiw. i learned to accept more people and understand more differeces. mostly i just opened up my mind. not literally
There was one moment in my junior year of high school that triggered a pretty big change in me. I went to a Catholic prep school, and I was taking a required course called Formation of Conscience. The teacher was sort of a hippie holdover from the 60s (this was in 1977), but one of the best teachers I had there. One day in the course of a discussion which I really wasn't even paying much attention to (I could never concentrate much in class), he asked a student if he had to go to school. The student, of course, said yes. The teacher pointed out that, no, he didn't HAVE to go, that there would be certain consequences of his not going that he might not like, but that he could in fact choose not to go. Well, this sort of blew my mind. I realized that I really had believed that I had to go to school, and that it actually wasn't true. And I began questioning the assumptions that I had been holding in such an automatic way, and questioning things I had been taught...and it started an avalanche of questioning and thinking, and I've been doing that ever since. Prior to that I had just sort of gone through life unthinkingly, unquestioningly. It was really the start of my intellectual and philosophical life.
meeting Lama Anagorika Govinda in Almora...
