The True Personality

Have you ever thought of recreating the attitude and personality of your favourite movie actor, sports personality, or your teacher? Like, you love his/her character and you want to live like them just because they are looking cool, right? Yeah, that will look cool to us also. But think about something — if you wanted to follow all these other personalities, then who are you? What is your personality and how do you define yourself? Will you say that you are the average of all the personalities you follow? No, right?

The Monk and the Empty Boat

There was a monastery where all monks used to live together and meditate. There were old monks and newcomers too. Every day, all the monks would meditate, and the younger monks had to report their meditation progress to their mentors. One child monk had difficulty while meditating. Whenever he sat for meditation, he would get disturbed by bird sounds, branch sounds, and the wind. So he went to his mentor and explained that he was unable to meditate because of these reasons.

The mentor observed the anger in every reason the child monk mentioned. Instead of giving him a direct solution, he simply replied, “Looks like you are frustrated about these reasons. You should find a way to meditate even in these disruptions.”

After speaking with his mentor, the child monk went near a lake and sat on its bank and tried to meditate. At first, everything felt calm, but again he got disturbed and angry. The next day he returned to the lake, saw a boat, and took it to the centre of the lake. He stopped rowing and started meditating there. This time he felt peaceful and he was finally able to meditate properly. He was happy because he thought he had found the perfect solution.

But on the third day, while meditating in the middle of the lake, he suddenly heard splashing water and felt his boat rocking. He became upset that even in the middle of the lake there was someone or something disturbing him. When he opened his eyes, he saw another boat coming directly toward him. He shouted, “Move your boat away or else you will hit mine!” But the other boat kept coming closer. He shouted again, but nothing changed. Finally, the boat crashed into his boat.

The young monk became furious. He screamed, “Who are you and why have you hit my boat in the middle of this vast lake?” But there was no answer. Confused and angry, he stood up to look inside the other boat. To his surprise, the boat was completely empty. It had simply drifted in the wind and bumped into his boat.

At that moment, the monk felt his anger disappear. It was just an empty boat. There was no one to get angry at. Suddenly he remembered his mentor’s question: “Do you know what is really making you angry?” And then he realized something important. It was not other people, situations, or circumstances that made him angry. It was his own reaction to them. The empty boat itself had no power to create anger inside him. All the people and situations that make us upset are just like the empty boat. They don’t have the power to make us angry without our own reaction.

The monk quietly rowed back to the monastery and continued meditating with the other monks. The noises and disturbances were still there, but something inside him had changed. When the elder monk saw the difference, he simply smiled and said, “I see that you have found what is really making you angry and overcome that.”

Personality Is Built Through Experience

Now think once about this story. Do you think this child monk was the only person in that monastery who faced this issue? No. Many others must have faced the same problem too, but the situations were different. When the child monk went to the mentor and explained his problem, the mentor did not directly give him a solution. Instead, he allowed the monk to discover the answer through his own experience.

If the mentor had simply shared his own solution or experience, it would have only become a lesson for the child monk. But personality is shaped through experiences, not through borrowed lessons. Lessons can give us wisdom to face situations, but true personality and attitude are built over time through living, struggling, failing, understanding, and growing through our own experiences.

Create Your Own Philosophy

Even today, we listen to many philosophies, follow different people, and explore different religions. But almost every philosophy eventually says the same thing: find yourself within yourself. And that can only happen through your own experiences.

Every philosophy you come across will eventually tell you to create your own philosophy. Never follow anything or anyone blindly. What to do and what not to do will always remain under your control.

Make experiments in your life. Experiments create mistakes and success, and from both of them we gain experiences. And truly, those experiences define your personality.

Along your path, just be kind and keep experimenting.