Do you remember the old Tom T. Hall country and western song I Love? The idea of the song is that you’re supposed to get to know better who the singer is by discerning the details of his likes. Likewise, if you click on the My Profile link on this blog, it will take you to a page that tells about me by listing areas that I am interested in. The sum total effect will reveal a little about who I am. We can go a little further than this, of course, in our quest to find out “who” someone is, by physically describing that person, in as great of detail as practical. We can also take the sum effects of our interactions with that person to make an assessment about his/her personality or character. The idea is to create a multidimensional mosaic, the result of which will be the subject’s essence. But what really is the true essence of a person?
I know for a solid fact that I didn’t feel any different about who I was when I was two years old than how I feel now at fifty-one. But in the time between, the matter comprising my body has been completely changed, along with the form of my body, including my brain. Things that I do now, physically and mentally, I do very differently than how I did them (if I did them) at two. I have amassed an incredible memory of the world and myself between two and fifty-one. And yet, I can abstract a sense of who I am, deep down inside, by disregarding all of the differences that could, in a paradoxical sort of way, also seem to define who I am. So how do you determine who you are? By seeing yourself in terms of all your traits and experiences? Or by filtering out all of those traits and experiences and discerning the remaining kernel of selfness? It may truly seem to be a paradox, but I hold that both point the way toward self-realization. This is another example of duality, where in order to achieve a goal, one must simultaneously adhere in a discerning way to two seemingly contradictory doctrines.
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«I know for a solid fact that I didn’t feel any different about who I was when I was two years old than how I feel now at fifty-one.»
ReplyDeleteReally? Can you really say that you had any concrete feelings about who you were, at the age of two? Can you really remember, without the haze of time and experiences since, how you felt when you were two?
I certainly can't. And yet I know that, whether or not someone might think I've changed fundamentally since then, I have a very different view of who I am, where I've been, where I'm going, and how I want to get there than I did when I was younger -- when I was, say, five, or ten, or fifteen, or even thirty.
All of that has been built over time, with bricks and mortar of experiences and relationships. I'm the sum of everything that's happened to me in 51 years, and of what all the people I've known in that time have contributed to the construction, one trowelful of mortar at a time.
You are in here somewhere. I can't tell you where, exactly; I don't know specifically what your contributions are, but there's a part of me that's how it is today because of our friendship from school days. And it's not just a superficial thing — it's not just that, say, I like the Beatles because we used to quiz each other on Beatles lyrics along with Bruce. It's much more than that.
At the age of two, I didn't know right from wrong, much less whether I would look to God or science or something else for my worldview; whether I would fight for civil rights and social change as a liberal or take a conservative line, demanding that we hold to the old ways; whether I would be analytical or artistic or athletic.
Did I even have a self-image at two? I don't know, but I did at five, and ten, and fifteen, and they were different... and my self-image now is vastly different from what it was then.
I think people do change throughout their lives, sometimes in small ways and sometimes in fundamental ones... and that we're all fabric made from everything and everyone around us, woven together in our own personal looms.
Barry, there is no doubt about the truth of what you’re saying. My experiences, relationships, and memories over the years do define me. But there is, I believe, another nature of mine (and I believe of each of us) that powers all of this. There is the instinctive feeling of being in the here and now, with the world coming head-on at me. The “This is It” feeling, so eloquently espoused by Kenny Loggins, that wherever or whenever you happen to be, you are on the very edge of time and space, and everything hinges on what you do now. And here. Unnoticed and even disparaged as trivial, it is as essential (in my opinion) to being as what the observer is to a scientific experiment, what a television screen is to what is being seen on it, or what a scrabble board is to the game developing on its surface. And it is this part of myself that I was referring to when I said that I was still the same from age two to fifty-one. Without either aspect of my self, there cannot be another. But don’t be mistaken, I’m not talking about anything that transcends my physical, biological nature. Everything I’ve brought out is grounded in my life experiences. What lies beyond that, I can only give my most reasonable, honest answer: I don’t know! When I was two, just as right now, I already possessed a lifetime of memories of experiences and relationships. I had my own likes and dislikes, just as I do now (although quite different). And in the future, I’m sure to meet up with new experiences and relationships, which will in turn shape who I will become. But through it all, there is, I feel, a continuity, a sameness that defies description, other than that it is my subjective essence.
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