Fragments of us

 I submitted an article and the first question my reviewer had asked  was 

“where are your references?”

It was quite staggering to get asked that because far as I remember, this was all me, I hadn’t checked any other source or looked for ideas any other place. The words I put down were all initiatives of my mind, the conjunctions conjured from within me.

Should I have referenced my head as the source?

But I did not doubt the likelihood of what I thought was mine, being another’s idea.

However It did make me question just how much originality is in us, how much of us is actually a direct initiative of ours un-influenced by another. 

For Even our bodies are in multiples, and through our course in time, we shall find ghosts of feuatures in others.

So what gives us the confidence that from mind  are thoughts unlike any other , and from our mouths are words that have never been said. 

In retrospect it becomes clear how unoriginal we actually are, 

Our words, thoughts, actions, beliefs are all influenced by what we come across, the factors that are cultivated into us.

It gets clearer when we understand that the same conditions if  applied in the same pattern may birth the same ideas in people across different places, and time even if their  paths will never cross intimately.

We are all fragments of each other, littered across time.

With this being said, I do not think we are therefore  without our own being, without what makes us unique.

Our ideas may not be entirely ours, but how we take them, how we flavor them, how we interpret them  Carries the flavours of our being, one that cannot be recreated,

Just like how a DNA is unique to one person 

That flavour is what is our originality.