Finding your root
introspection and inscription of my inner self
Root user in Linux
All the Linux users might have used this command ‘whoami’ at some point in their life. When you type in whoami in your terminal in unix based OS and hit enter, it displays the current logged-in username. Quite often in UNIX based systems, it is the root user if you have privileged access to the system.
Now, who is this root user, someone from a Windows background may wonder? It is a user account that by default has access to all commands and files on a Unix-like operating system. And is also referred to as a superuser for the same reason.
Root user in Life
I want to extend this root user analogy from the Linux world to life and present here who is the root user of my life, the core of my existence, my emotional quotient and intelligence quotient supervisor, my very being, and the answer to the very pertinent question, “whoami”? :D
Below is an illustration of a Venn diagram that I created recently on paper between my mind, my heart, and my soul. The intersection of these three is my root. I have named it VK which is the initial of my first name and last name.
Components shaping my root —
The mind is important to comprehend and act based on previous similar scenarios and uses the metadata collected over time to determine the next steps. The heart component looks for passion into all things I do and soul consciousness is something which helps me to gauge how I would like to indulge myself more in something I pursue. All three components when combined together in the right amount shape up my root.
How my root helps me in different walks of life -
This foundation of me which I inscribed above establishes how I drive growth and movement in my personal life, move up the ladder in my professional capacity, and the passion projects I work upon during my spare time. I will now share a glimpse of the same in all three areas of my life below:-
Personal — Growing up I was an introvert for most of my school life and my life experiences pushed me to be an ambivert now. I have lived in different cities, gone to different schools, made new friends which seemed to be a daunting task back then but not anymore. Being surrounded by a circle of close-knit friends, I am also good at keeping my own company. I indulge in a lot of self-talk almost like conducting 1–1 with my root which we see in corporate life. Many great revelations come out of those conversations that I have in my solitude and often write them down in my digital notes to look back in times of need.
Professional — The traits of VK in her professional capacity are that of being diligent, sincere, and assertive. Right from her college days, she had taken efforts to go an extra mile in any project she is working on and generate new avenues of learning and sharing it across with her peers ranging from organizing technical workshops, giving live demos to now sharing her work in open source projects on GitHub, having a youtube channel where she shares her knowledge on Kubernetes.
Passion project — The third and last part I want to share with you all is about the passions in life that are driven by my root, VK. She uses her free time to read books, do blogging where she articulates her learnings from the field of technical expertise, public speaking, leadership skills, productivity hacks, etc on the blogging site Medium. Oftentimes, she also documents her experiences via video and uploads them on her Youtube channel. This year her aim is to read more books than last year and she already had a good start in the month of January by finishing two books- Keep Going by Austin Kleon and Persuasion by Jane Austen.
Conclusion- To sum up, I would urge all my readers to find this root for yourself, your very foundation, be friends with it, let that root be your cheerleader, your best buddy and I request you to not leave it’s side in any circumstances. Keep going, come what may!
