Last night I thought how it usually doesn’t take much to reignite my interest in the concept of identity. One of the things that makes it so interesting is that many people believe their identity is absolute – that who and what they are have been identified, so to speak, and that is simply how it is.
One example is a 22-year-old woman who works at an electronics store. She might think of herself in a certain way, but change her surroundings, the people around her, the economic needs of the community, and within a few years she may be mother to a few children and married to a poor farmer who tries to eke a living out of a patch of dry land.
Of course it is your own business to contemplate what other roles or identities slumber within you that may not currently have an opportunity to come out. You may currently be a single man or woman in your thirties, but inside you lurks a very competent mother or father. You may currently be struggling in your career, but within ten years you’ll be giving talks about career choices and how to improve your chances of success. Or, you may currently be struggling with health problems or even addiction, but hiding inside you is a health consultant and a fitness instructor.
Identity is a fluid concept – don’t lock away your best identity before it has had a chance to develop.
If you have any hope or ambition to make money on the financial markets, it is of the utmost importance to start the learning process when you do not need to make money from it.
Start reading books on how to interpret the markets and how to trade and start practising at least two or three years before you want to make a penny from it. This should eliminate desperation and impatience. It will give you time to make mistakes and learn from them. It will teach you how to be disciplined and how to control your emotions. You will have time to get to know yourself as an operator on the markets. You will learn where your strengths and your weaknesses are. And you will learn how, when and in which markets to get involved.
The same advice applies to any way with which you may hope to make money independent of boss and corporation. Learn how to do something long before you need to make money from it.
• Neanderthal DNA differs only 0.3% from that of modern humans.
• The first people with proto-Neanderthal traits lived in Eurasia 350,000 to 600,000 years ago.
Credit: Tim Evanson, via Wikimedia Commons
• The first so-called real Neanderthals made their appearance between 200,000 and 250,000 years ago.
• A comprehensive 2014 study of Neanderthal bones and tools have proven that Neanderthals became extinct in Europe between 41,000 and 39,000 years ago.
• This estimate coincides with the start of a very cold period in Europe, and is 5,000 years after Homo sapiens had reached Europe.
• A comparison of the DNA of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens suggests that the two groups separated from a common ancestor between 350,000 and 400,000 years ago. This ancestor was probably Homo heidelbergensis.
• Heidelbergensis developed between 800,000 and 1.3 million years ago and became extinct about 200,000 years ago.
• Heidelbergensis’ habitat ranged over eastern and southern Africa, Europe and West Asia.
• It is believed that the African branch of Heidelbergensis started to develop in the direction of modern humans between 350,000 and 400,000 years ago and the Eurasian branch developed in the direction of the Neanderthals.
• According to radiocarbon dating the earliest known remains of Cro-Magnon-like people are between 43,000 and 45,000 years old.
• The Cro-Magnon people are regarded as the ancestors of modern Europeans.
Credit: Original uploader Elapied at French Wikipedia, via Wikimedia Commons
• There are indications that some Cro-Magnon people had blue eyes and dark hair, and a “black” complexion.
• It is estimated that anatomically modern humans made their first appearance in East Africa 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
• According to one theory an exodus from Africa through the Arabian Peninsula about 60,000 years ago brought modern humans to Eurasia, with one group settling in the coastal areas around the Indian Ocean and the other group moving further north into Central Asia.
• The inland group is regarded as the founders of North and East Asians, Caucasians, large parts of Middle Eastern populations, and the populations of North Africa.
• Migration from the Black Sea region to Europe began about 45,000 years ago, and by about 20,000 years ago modern humans had reached the western edge of Europe.
• Cro-Magnon people shared the European landscape with Neanderthals for 10,000 years or more, until the latter disappeared from the fossil record.
• There is uncertainty about the relationship between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon people, and about the disappearance or destruction of the former. Theories include peaceful coexistence, competition, interbreeding, assimilation and genocide.
I want a definition of Christianity so that I know what I mean when I talk about it.
This is how I see it: Christianity refers to a cultural and religious community that provides a philosophical and moral framework from which people who call themselves “Christians” derive a core part of their identity.
religion = the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods; a particular system of faith and worship; a pursuit or interest followed with great devotion
philosophy = the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline; a theory or attitude that acts as a guiding principle for behaviour
culture = the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively; the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society
community = a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common; the condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common
What does 2015 mean? What does it mean that I was born in 1971? And no one except scientists even talks about 2045 or 2055!
It’s been bothering me for some time that these numbered years keep floating in my mind yet I don’t quite know how they fit together. And before I know, the numbers have changed again.
Here is one explanation:
I was born in 1871. It is now 1915, the second calendar year of the Great War. If I can avoid serious misfortune and disease and maintain a fairly healthy lifestyle, I can expect to live until roughly the mid-1940s.
That means I was born in the year when Otto von Bismarck led Prussia and allied German states to victory over France and the unification of Germany. As a South African I can talk of my contemporaries Jan Smuts, Louis Botha and Sol Plaatje. On the international scene my contemporaries include Mahatma Gandhi, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin and Vladimir Lenin.
My last days may arrive when I am in my seventies, about the time the Allies defeat the fascists in World War II, or soon after. Should I survive another decade and live until my mid-eighties, I would see in a colour magazine or possibly on black-and-white TV how a young upstart called Elvis Presley shakes his leg like no decent man would have done in my day.
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(Acknowledgement for the Bismarck photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R68588 / P. Loescher & Petsch / CC-BY-SA 3.0)
