I recently read that 97% of the genetic make up of men and women are the same leaving just 3% different. And yet that is a significant 3% in that it is in every cell. It is the masculine and the feminine. It is the 3% that plays into the way we are defined.
It is an illusive percentage as it is that which supports part of the way we define ourselves and yet it is a part of ourselves that we can not define with clarity or without risk of putting ourselves in boxes assigned with confining labels.
Masculine
Feminine
How can we define these terms, these qualities, while leaving room for expression, individuality, and growth?
Over the past few months I have posed various questions to men and women alike regarding what it means to be a man? Does this differ from country to country and culture to culture? Does it differ from family to family?
Similarly, I can ask the same questions about being a woman?
How can we support and encourage our kids to embrace and strengthen these qualities if we find them so difficult to define?
And they are difficult to define – Try it. I am open to hearing your thoughts.
Perhaps many choose not to embrace that 3% of themselves, choosing to focus on the 97% that is “human.” That 97% that we share. It is easier, perhaps, to define what it is to be a human than to find the words that resonate with each of us illuminating the feminine and the masculine.
Oh, and we have both feminine and masculine in each of us anyway. We are a balance of the yin and the yang.
I have moved from “what is a man?” to “What is masculine?” and “What is feminine?”
Are these qualities that dwell within us naturally? Qualities we must learn? Qualities that we hide or those we must work to find?
And are there words to capture these qualities beyond the general? My daughter is naturally feminine and yet, I am at a loss to describe what I mean in that statement. It is a quality that she has possessed since birth; a natural part of who she is.
And what, pray tell, does it all mean???
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