Earlier this year I discovered and fell in love with the writings of Virginia Satir.  Satir is known as a pioneer in family therapy and her work has laid the foundations for many approaches used today like positive psychology and IFS.  Not that I'm a psychologist.  But I do love the way the mind works and have always been drawn to understanding the inner workings of human beings.  Her writings are crisp and poetic.  Below is an excerpt from the preface she wrote in her book “Your Many Faces”.  I hope you enjoy this.

“I can offer this invitation because you are a member of the human race, and as such, you are a miracle.  Furthermore, you are a one of a kind miracle.  Let’s consider the evidence:  Each fingerprint on every human being is different.  Imagine, 6.9 billion people now present in the world, plus all those who have come before and will come in the future.  All have their own unique fingerprints.  There are no duplicates?  How could anyone think up so many variations?  That really boggles my mind.  And yet it is an indisputable fact.  Each of us is different.

It is also true that any surgeon who learns his or her surgery anywhere in the world can successfully operate on any human being, regardless of culture, race, nationality, language, age, occupation, religious affiliation, or political persuasion, because hearts, heads, and other parts of the anatomy will all be in relatively the same place.  Correspondingly, children are always conceived in the same and are birthed from the same place.  We are also all the same.

Furthermore, consider the fantastic array of systems within the human body.  Where else can you find a television; telephone; camera; radio; telegraph; computer; sewage, plumbing, heating, and cooling systems; and factories making all kinds of products (blood, chemicals, tissue, bones, and sweat)  all done up in one small unit?

Take a moment to look around you and you will see that people come in all kinds of wrappings and all kinds of colors, speak in all kinds of languages, and cook in a thousand different ways.  People perform incredible feats including unbelievable destruction and repulsive cruelty, as well as unparalleled generosity, sometimes sacrificing everything, including their lives, for the love and care of fellow humans.  People, including myself, are my fascination, my source of nurture, delight, growth, struggle, and pain.  All of us share in a whole range of emotions, which I often call our juices:  anger, joy, fear, curiosity, love, excitement, helplessness, and powerfulness.  What triggers these feelings in each of us is different, but the capacity for these feelings is the same.

You have your own special wrapping, your own size, color, features, sex, age background, thoughts, feelings and approaches to things, as do I.  Yet at the same time each of us is a combination of sameness and differentness to every other human being.  With some groups of people we may feel more alike, for example, women with women, men with men, or artists with artists.  Oftentimes we tend to stay close to that which is familiar and to turn away from that which is unfamiliar.

I want to challenge this idea.  I think we have lost a lot of life’s riches, and are continuing to do so, because we haven’t learned the lesson of our own uniqueness.  No matter how much alike we think we are, we are still different, and no matter how different we think we are, we are still alike.  If you believe, as many people do, that your sameness creates your basis for trust and safety, and your differentness creates your problems, then you are using only half your resources.  Everyone would like to be without problems, and if you think that differentness creates your problems, you will use your energy to get rid of it.  I think sameness can be comfortable, but if that is all there is, in time it leads to boredom.  Differentness can be a source of difficulty, but it also holds the key to a lot of locked-up energy and experiences that make life exciting and fulfilling…”