Some things are, within reason, ubiquitous to us all. We’re human beings. We all have belly buttons. We all eat, blink, and shit. Everyone breathes, grows, and digests. The cells in our body all die and are replaced. The body's cells largely replace themselves every 7 to 10 years. In other words, old cells mostly die and are replaced by new ones during this time span.

So, who are you really? You are a wholly unique human being born into, and a product of, the fundamental influencing factors listed. Even though they may seem limiting, you are ‘this’ generation's iteration of a person with the criteria listed here. Biodiversity refers to every living thing, including plants, bacteria, animals, and humans. Scientists have estimated that there are around 8.7 million species of plants and animals in existence. Medical News Today says there are about 72 genders to identify with. There exist 41 musical genres to explore and 28 styles of dancing. There are 136 narcotics one can introduce to the body and four types of alcoholic beverages: beer, wine, spirits, and liqueurs. There are over 12,000 jobs or careers to choose from.

We all have a memory bank inside our brain, and the average adult human brain can store the equivalent of 2.5 million gigabytes of digital memory. We speak one or more of the 7,100 languages in the world and participate in 3,800 cultures. There are 250,000 to 300,000 species of edible plants. There are 65,000 living species of fish, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and birds, and we can hunt, trap, or fish and then eat them. An international research effort called the Human Genome Project, which worked to determine the sequence of the human genome and identify the genes that it contains, estimated that humans have between 20,000 and 25,000 genes. There are 86 billion neurons inside your head, connecting memories, positing thoughts, and weighing decisions.

According to science, there are 27 human emotions, and we live within a web of tangled bits of them. They are: admiration, adoration, aesthetic appreciation, amusement, anger, anxiety, awe, awkwardness, boredom, calmness, confusion, craving, disgust, empathic pain, entrancement, excitement, fear, horror, interest, joy, nostalgia, relief, romance, sadness, satisfaction, sexual desire, and surprise.

There are some 14 reactive ingredients like mental impairments, drunkenness, drugs, tiredness, neural capacities, time limits, illnesses, general disbelief, disbelief due to previous influences, harmony, meditation, and sicknesses that will inflate or constrict a wider sense of these emotions.

There are seven ways of thinking about things: Critical Thinking, Analytical Thinking, Creative Thinking, Abstract Thinking, Concrete Thinking, Convergent Thinking, and Divergent Thinking.

We have 43 facial muscles that can display over 10,000 different expressions. There are 143 different skin tones and 12 types of hair, which can be modified into over 1,200 styles. Blondes have about 120,000 hairs on their heads, brunettes 150,000, and redheads about 90,000.

In our experiences of life, there are six categories of experiences:

  1. Physical experience
  2. Mental experience
  3. Emotional experience
  4. Spiritual experience
  5. Social experience
  6. Virtual experience

These fall into 47 types of human experiences: Adulthood, Aesthetics, Aging, Belief, Birth, Change, Childhood, Community, Competition, Conflict, Constraint, Creativity, Culture, Destruction, Emotion, Empathy, Failure, Family, Fear, Freedom, Friendship, Happiness, Hate, Imagination, Joy, Learning, Logic, Mortality, Motivation, Nature, Physical, Play, Privacy, Problems, Rational thought, Rest, Self-fulfillment, Sense, Sickness, Society, Space, Spirituality, Spontaneity, Success, Time, Virtual experience, and Work.

Where we move our body and how we move it are done in our country—one of the 195 that currently exist—and often how much freedom you have is due to the political environment you live in. We can live in one (or more) of ten political types: Democracy, Communism, Socialism, Oligarchy, Aristocracy, Monarchy, Theocracy, Colonialism, Totalitarianism, and Military Dictatorship.

In conjunction with our country or nationality, it may be congruent with a belief system like religion. The 12 major religions include Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Taoism, Judaism, Confucianism, Bahá'í, Shinto, Jainism, and Zoroastrianism.

But there are also over 4,000 recognized religions in the world today, consisting of churches, congregations, faith groups, tribes, healing centers, cultures, and movements. Other people, self-seekers who are confused over being organized or limited by any of these, often believe in elements of two or more, often conflicting, religions. There are varying shades of agnostics.

There are 10 classifications of disabilities. They are: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Learning Disabilities, Mobility Disabilities, Medical Disabilities, Psychiatric Disabilities, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Visual Impairments, Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Concussion, and Autism Spectrum Disorders.

These form the 21 types of disabilities. They are Blindness, Low-vision, Leprosy Cured persons, Hearing Impairment (deaf and hard of hearing), Locomotor Disability, Dwarfism, Intellectual Disability, Mental Illness, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Cerebral Palsy, Muscular Dystrophy, Chronic Neurological conditions, Specific Learning Disabilities, Multiple Sclerosis, Speech and Language disability, Thalassemia, Hemophilia, Sickle Cell disease, Multiple Disabilities including deaf/blindness, Acid Attack victim, and Parkinson's disease.

There are also 16 different attributes that make you unique. They are genetics, physical characteristics, personality, attitude, perspective, habits, intellect, goals, experience, relationships, creativity, passion, communication, humor, taste, and travel.

Which brings me back to our everyman/everywoman wishing to be seen as captain of our own ship: we stand at the helm with good intentions overruled by the above factors; we wish to be the Zen master of our own dojo, yet the times we contemplate exactly that are compromised/enhanced/influenced by physical changes beyond our control; we wish to be seen as the director in our own movie, but are actually bit players.

Sources:

Image:

  • Gary Larson/The Far Side (cartoon)
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