Jennifer, I do not think that you would lose who you are at all. On the contrary I think by slowing our thoughts to take each into account we find out more about who we actually are than we ever knew. My reasoning is pretty simple; it’s like the difference between watching a movie with high details in regular vs. slow motion. When we watch in regular speed we lose a lot of the important details surrounding the scenes because we struggle to keep up with what we think the main theme of each frame is. When we slow things down we see each frame as they were intended to be seen and therefore have a lot more to take into consideration when evaluating the overall theme of the scene. I think this example demonstrates greatly our potential for understanding. Most of us do that very thing you said and speed in our thought patterns. Its like we are looking at streaming stock quotes going across the digital board of our minds and taking in all the ticker information [knowledge] that we see but we do not understand what each thing really means. It is imperative that we be able to stop that streaming flow to question each symbol and find out the who’s, what’s, and why’s of its being. When we slow down to find those we gain understanding to solidify the foundation of our knowledge of each. These steps would not cause us to lose who we are but to gain who we really are.