The Curious Question of Is: pt 5

Gotta, gotta, gotta get this last bit down before the house disintegrates around this corner of the couch.  (Just kidding – the disintegration would start at this corner of the couch).  And I don’t even know if I’m still making any sense.

Yesterday, I went into the surgical center for a standard but breathtakingly costly cancer screening (me yesterday, G today).  Sedation.  That was the fun part.  “It’s probably better if you don’t bring any valuables or personal effects with you,” they said to me.  So I didn’t.  I left behind the purse and the wallet and the cell phone and the reading glasses—everything that makes me human.  Guy carried my driver’s license in case they needed proof of identity.

I mean, they’d want to know I was me, huh?  At least that my face was the right face.  But it turned out they didn’t even need that.  The fact that I showed up at the appointed time and paid the bill (with G’s version of our credit card) was enough.

This is a complicated little bit of the discussion here – all they really needed to know about who I was had to do with my paying the bill, and what was going on in my innards.  Which was what I was there to find out about myself: am I the kind of person who gets colon cancer (for whatever reasons – behavioral, genetic, environmental)?  And will I turn out to be the kind of person who ends up doing a voice over about how going to the Surgical Center saved my life from a silent killer?  Or am I the kind of person who could have used the money to go to Disneyland and been just as well off (which could work a couple of ways)?

But that really isn’t the point of the story.  The point is that, when they called my name, I went into the business end of the building all by myself – nothing and no one to tell anybody who I was, what kind of life I lead, whether or not I have any value in the world—except a bracelet they’d put around my wrist (proving I had paid and noting the kind of service I was to be put through).  And soon, there I was, without even the clothes I had chosen to buy, and then wear.  Just the same, exact surgical gown half the people back there were already wearing.

The only parts of me left were – just me.

I had about four minutes to communicate to those doctors who they were dealing with – before I slipped away in a narcotic sleep.  And what did I use?  Only my words.  The doctor had his back to me as I came in.  But I made him laugh, anonymous as I was.  And that was important to me, that I could connect with him enough to make him realize that I was a real person, before my life was in his hands (you never know with sedatives).

And now I am going to quote a couple of the answers I made to some really good comments that were made on the last entry:

Sometimes, I’ve felt like, “Yeah – they think I’m what they think I am NOW, but wait till they know the REAL me – ” because I know that there are so many weak places inside myself. And sometimes I’m even afraid to find those myself. The lurking deep selfishness. The tendency to give in to chocolate. The knee jerk need to protect my dignity, and to be offended and infuriated when somebody bosses me in any way. What if somebody who thinks they like me ends up seeing THOSE?

We do choose things from the standpoint of the perspectives and desires that are strong in us at the moment of choice. But we also have to choose out of what is placed there in front of us. I am coming close to seeing my own answer in these two sentences – the self is exposed in the choices. Not in the single incidence of choice, but in the aggregate of choices within a time frame (what we’d accept as the solid present, based on the past). If you keep telling the truth when you have the opportunity – even the compelling opportunity to lie, then telling the truth is part of your self. If you choose to invest your time in family over art or work or money or other people, and you do it consistently, then that is quite evidently what you are.

I really do believe that we collect tools along the way of our experience. Tools, standards, self-expectations – some about innate duty. And out of them, we build inner imperatives: you must do what is good. You must choose what is honest. You must turn away from what is destructive. You will not buy approval or love by compromising what you believe is right.

Or for some, the imperatives might be quite different: get what you can any way you are able to get it –  (the ends justify the means), money is more important than love or children, self-expression trumps family or ethics or the good of the audience, get a fix no matter what it costs.

The imperatives are, then, at least in part a sum total of your perspectives and desires.

And finally:

I think the truth of ourselves comes down to this: what do you choose, now – today – this week (as opposed to “used to”) when nobody’s looking?  That, I think, is where we can see our core selves (like leaving a camera in the forest, connected to bait – and ending up with a photograph of the culprit.)

So maybe, if the question of who you really are ever comes up in your mind, the thing to do is to sit down and take a good long look at that very strong evidence. Because if we want to decide who we are going to be, we have to start with the real, functional truth.

Some things we don’t like about ourselves are chemical (some things we like are, too).  Some are long time, deeply ingrained habits of thought or behavior. And maybe I’m even talking about something as integral as epicgenetics, here.

But if we don’t like what we see in our sneaky hidden-camera photograph, there’s just one more question to ask:

Are we or are we not the “kind of people” who have the courage and discipline to decide for ourselves who we are going to be?

The answer to that is in the very next choices we make.

—— so I’m done.  I’ve gotta go box up a baby shower present.  And go to the shower, even though I really want to go to bed, darn it.  I don’t think we’ve really settled anything for the whole universe here, but thanks for walking through all this with me.  Cause it was kind of fun.

THE END