Sir, - The tendency in Ireland towards stereotyping set me musing on the importance of sharpening our awareness of the labelless and indeed unlabelable "I" in our human make-up which can be obscured by a veritable virus one might call "labelitis".
Granted that we must have such word-tags as Catholic, Protestant, Dub, culchie, liberal, idealist, progressive, etc (the list is endless), it seems to me that we lose much of the waiting wonder in human beings - and the beauty in the world around us - in getting tied up in such depersonalising wordsignposts which jerk us about so often like puppets on a string.
A veritable maelstrom of conditioning swirls daily around our "I", sometimes transforming the latter into, so to speak, a "me" which identifies with mere labels (e.g. religion, occupation, titles, success, failure etc). This conditioned, programmed self is frequently foolish, selfish, possessive, focusing on a tagged, fragmented reality, unlike the unadulterated "I", whose simple gaze is more easily aware of the "behind-the-label" mystery inherent in the personality.
Perhaps our unfortunate and frequent unawareness of the rich beauty hidden beneath the complex personality of each individual (or, indeed, behind everything in the universe) could be compared to capturing on film a person, object or scene which we never really saw but only photographed and inserted in an album as a second-hand souvenir of something merely noticed. - Yours, etc.,
Laytown, Co Meath.