Okay, so you are going to be very impressed and entertained by this set of slick charts I’ve made up for you. Really. You will be.
Our hero is SAM. No, Sam, not specifically you. Just—Sam. We pass by all his child-life and here we are, in his Real Person period. He’s a grown up. In this chart, he is.
The path he stands on is himself. It is independent of the scenes on either side. Like a moving sidewalk except opposite – the path doesn’t move, but the ground on either side of it is always moving, always in one direction. Right to left, the wind against his face. And the speed of the movement of the scenes is the speed of time. Whatever that is.
So Sam is standing on the path. He’s been a kid, gone to school, made choices – and some of that growing was part of the inevitable movement of time – like, he’s taller, and his endocrine systems kicked in automatically at some point, and his brain was re-wired between the ages of 11 and 24.
But the rest of the path, Sam covered all by himself. By choosing one thing instead of another. By learning to read and think and drive and all those things.
In this first chart, he is standing there firmly on the path of his life, while the world goes on, moving past him in time.
I guess one of the questions I’m going to ask is this: is the Sam who is so confident and firmly planted in Chart #1—having groomed himself to fit into this nice world with the mountains and the clear sky and the crops growing in the background—
is he the same Sam in the second chart, with the sea raging to his left and the desert at his right?
He still stands on his path. His favorite color is still blue. He still really likes chocolate with mint in it. And science fiction movies. And watching football. He still tries to be honest in his dealings with his fellow man and works hard and loves his family.
But time has changed the world around him. And some of his assumptions don’t work anymore. And some – if not a great deal – of his actual worldly knowledge (like how to change the needle in his record player or how to make computer punch cards or how to cut ice in the local lake to fill his ice-house for the summer) no longer applies to anything. Even his sense of the rhythm of life may be completely out of synch with the dynamic world around him.
His little kids who thought he was Santa Clause, God and Walt Disney all rolled into one—they’re taller now, and he has now become, somehow, their nemesis.
So who is he? Because, like I say – he’s standing on that same solid path.
But is he still Sam?
Here is the heart of it.
Sam is. He’s standing there right in front of us.
Let there be no question about this. He lives. He breathes.
But does he still fit?
Should he have to fit?
And if he should—do we mean always? Or just sometimes?
How important is that? Is fitting a measure of who we are?
I think that one of the key bits to this is that Sam can move on his own path. Things happen all around him. Things can happen to him. But the path has to do with what he feeds into his own mind, how he learns, what he chooses.
The Sam who knows how to deal with mountains may not translate into a broader statement: Sam knows how to deal with the world. Because maybe he can’t swim. Or couldn’t swim before.
Maybe who Sam is has a lot to do with whether or not he can learn to swim. Or whether he’s willing to or capable of recognizing the need for swimming. And that he subsequently has the energy, courage and willingness to learn.
Is the real Sam the fat Sam? Or the skinny Sam? My answer? Whatever Sam stands here on the path before us is the real one, because I believe that we are our choices. We are all at once what we want, and whether we choose to pursue that desire actively – to the good or the bad. Which is all to say that we can change what we are. Even allowing for genetic characteristics – which we may or may not be able to change behaviorally (I have no science about this – and I doubt that a sweeping statement can cover all genetic characteristics), we can decide to start choosing differently. And then decide to do it. Whatever it takes. And what happens next all figures into the definition of our selves. Does this make sense? Captain of our fate and all that.
A friend of mine asked me once this hard question: which Meg is real – the one with anxiety and depression and anorexia, or the one that controls all of those things by medication. My tendency is to say that the real Meg is the one who decided to fight for her balance instead of letting things go on.
On the Biggest Loser, a huge man talked about the shocking journey of analyzing his own life, his choices up to the present. And in the present, he, being offered an education about nutrition and how the body functions and about the extreme consequences of the choices he had been making, had turned his back on those choices, only looking forward. But he had built a life around those choices. And now that he was choosing different things, it was like he was cutting off the old life—and having no idea what the new life was going to be. “I’ve realized, I don’t know myself at all,” he said. And I think what he meant was, take away the old things that were me, and I don’t know what’s left. I don’t know even what I have to work with.
Fortunately for him, over the next many weeks, there will be people there to point out bits of him to himself. See? You thought you couldn’t do that, and you DID. Look at the choice you just made – that shows strength of mind. These are things he might not, after so many years of taking another path, recognize at all in himself without help. And not recognizing them, might back out of starting a new way, looking for the comfort of the old self he knew.
And one more thing – I have never understood why people “look for their roots” in the past. I’m a genealogist, but I look for my ancestors because I want to know who THEY were, not who I am. Just because my gggg uncle was a horse thief from Lithuania doesn’t really tell me a thing about myself. Or if he turned about to be a hard-working entrepreneur who made bank, that doesn’t mean I have those same gifts. I am me. Now. The question is, if I have legitimate gripes about the me I am (if I let people down, if I am destroying my body with bad habits, if I can’t handle money, if I’m weak with my kids or unkind or gossipy, or pick fights – ), can I change to a new me. A new self. An edited me that pares down the weak parts and plays up the strengths in the basic program?
I think that learning allows Sam to move up and down the path. Maybe not so much down the path – unless that’s where you look for playfulness and eagerness of mind. But I’m thinking that if he wants to, Sam can run to meet what’s coming if he wants to.
And maybe that is the very thing I’m writing about.
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