People

The people in our life: what are they all about?

At any given moment, a Person is the result of two broad forces: often, these forces are referred to as Nature and Nurture.

Nature

Nature is what a person arrives with. The raw material. The stuff they have when they are born.

This includes the physical body — its capabilities, limitations, tendencies, etc.

The hardware a person is equipped with.

Many cultures acknowledge genetics; some also consider additional factors present at birth: astrological configurations, inherited karma, innate temperament, or other elements believed to shape a person's starting point.

Nature defines the boundaries of what is possible.

For most humans - these limits could be such as the inability to grow wings; likely inability to see ultraviolet light.

Aside from these inabilities - the abilities within the boundaries are vast!

Nurture

Nurture refers to the things that happen and experiences people encounter along the way.

The things that shape the individual.

Everything a person learns, everything a person is exposed to.

The culture and environment a person grows up in.

The language a person learns to speak and communicate with.

The places, things and other people a person encounters.

The things that happen during the life experience — the good, the bad, and the funnily.

Nurture operates within constraints set by Nature.

Although a person may not be able to sprout wings and learn to fly, a person can learn to build airplanes.

Nature constrains what Nurture can do; Nature sets the boundaries. Nurture works within them.

The same environment will shape two different people in two different ways, because they showed up with something different: a different composition; different raw material.

Regardless of the elements that compose an outlook on Nature, although Nature constrains Nurture, Nurture in-turn shapes how Nature expresses itself.

Two people with similar natural capabilities can end up with different manifestations depending on their experiences.

The Components

Looking more closely, we can see how the pieces connect:

Physical Body: Defined by Nature. The vessel that enables everything else.
Cognition: Enabled by the Physical Body. The capacity to think, perceive, and process.
Experiencing: What happens to you. Raw input from the world. Interpreted into Nurture.
Learning: The deliberate or incidental acquisition of knowledge. Evolves Nurture over time.
Nurture: The accumulated result of Experiencing and Learning, structured by Cognition.

Cognition forms a main component of Nurture and shapes itself continuously.

What a person knows affects what they think; subsequently what a person thinks affects what they learn.

Nurture even conditions the Physical Body over time: habits, stress, environment, etc all leave their mark over time.

The Person (Current State)

At any given moment, a "Person" is the output of all of this: Nature and Nurture, interacting over Time, producing a current state.

This current state is not fixed: it shifts as new experiences accumulate, learning occurs, and the body changes.

When we interact with another Person, we are interacting with their current state — shaped by forces we may know nothing about.

When we try to understand ourselves, we are examining a current state that emerged from a history we may not fully remember or comprehend.

This is the Person. This is what we are working with.