This is what mountains do to you.
We are what we repeat.
The sights, sounds, smells, tastes, temperatures, and touch we keep repeating become familiarity.
Sights become our family, home, neighborhood, community, city.
Sounds become our mother tongue, music, language, speech.
Smells become our flavor, hygiene, memory, nostalgia.
Taste becomes our food, culture, comfort, craving.
Temperature, touch, and texture become our place, people, objects, environment.
The thoughts we keep repeating become our beliefs.
The feelings we keep repeating become our values.
The actions we keep repeating become our habits.
The actions we keep repeating become our skills.
The locomotions we keep repeating become the way we walk, run, move.
All these repetitions weave together.
And all of this becomes a story.
The story we keep repeating about our experiences and ourselves becomes identity.
There is a twist here.
If there is no “You,” there is no need for an “I.”
But once a “You” appears, repetition no longer happens in isolation.
Repetition now happens in the presence of others.
So repetition is shaped. It is adjusted. Through approval and disapproval.
It is rewarded or rejected.
And things like status, importance, legacy come into play.
“I” exists against “You”. What is not “I” is “You”. What is similar becomes a “We”.
What is approved gets repeated more freely. More openly. More demonstratively.
What is disapproved gets repeated less. Or not at all. Or only in private.
And, it becomes a social theater.
Approved repetitions become legacy, culture, tradition, profession, innovation, nation, country, contribution, success, trophies.
Disapproved repetitions become anarchy, barbarism, philistinism, alienness, statelessness, selfishness, failure, crime, prison sentence.
The same act, repeated in different contexts, becomes different things.
The social layer selects what continues.
And what continues becomes truth. But truth changes as the social layer changes.
Then the social layer feeds back into the personal layer.
What we repeatedly perform socially becomes who we are.
What we are allowed to repeat becomes who we are allowed to become.
What we repeat regardless becomes non-sensical first.
Legacy if approved.
Insanity if disapproved.
But underneath it all we are repeating the same thing across millennia and civilizations.
Be careful of what you repeat - thoughts, emotions, actions.
We do have a choice, regardless of what we let ourself believe.
Then again, belief is just another repetition.