Identity

Who are you? On a high school retreat, we paired off with a partner and were asked to write 1) how we perceive ourselves, 2) how we think others perceive us, and then our partner would write how they actually perceived us. Needless to say, these descriptions were not identical. It is safe to say that, though there are generalizations about us on which everyone would agree, we are perceived differently by each individual with whom we come in contact. So, in addition to working on our inner selves, we must also work on our public relations or no one will ever know who we really are.

When we meet someone, we size them up without thinking. We take in their clothing, their hairstyle, their general appearance and demeanor, their stance, their speech, their sexuality, even the shape of the muscles on their face which tells us what mood they're in and how their facial habits have affected their affect. We can sense if someone is an angry person, a joyous person, a serene person, an anxious person, and we approach them and treat them as such without any consciousness of it. There are people who draw us in and people who push us away.

I am reminded of this as I think about the way in which I think my co-workers would describe me. I think my boss would think that I am absent-minded and flighty. The people I used to supervise would see me as self-assured and implacable, even in the tensest situations. People in other departments might see me as quiet and thoughtful. My current co-workers would know me as creative and friendly.

I am all of these things, but if I were to write a description of myself, these are not the things on which I would focus. How do I want you to know me? I am a person who feels very intensely his own presence. I am living consciously and celebrating each moment I'm alive. Even when there's pain, I am thankful for being able to experience it, thankful of having the human experience of it. (Don't get me wrong - I'm thankful for pain relievers too!) I feel the connection between all things, and understand that all I know about matter is what I can perceive with my senses. I think there is more to reality than what we can sense. I feel that the arts are a way to transcend the prison that our mind and senses create. In making art, music, dance, writing, we are allowed to take what is otherwise un-sayable in our minds and give it manifest form. When we do this, we allow others into our minds and can more fully share our experience of being human.

If you were to listen to some of my songs, read some of my stories, or sit with some of my paintings, you might get a better sense of who I am than I could ever tell you. When we visit museums, we don't get descriptions of painters' day-to-day existences, we get the nuances of their souls. If a painting is good, it's because you know how the painter felt making it. And better still, how they felt about life - what it was like in their mind. If you looked through my oeuvre, you would see a mind that has never been at rest, a mind that has had explosions of energy and emotion, a mind that saw the world with new eyes every day. This is what I want you to know about me. That I am not a static, describable being - none of us are. I am a process that has continued for almost 49 years and continues to unfold every day. You can never know me, you can only know what I have affected.

So our identity is defined by what we affect. Like with the energy that we call light, we can't see it, we can only see its effect on matter. Our self-consciousness is built by the reactions we see in other people. We cannot judge any action good or bad without the reactions of others. We see negative reactions and we may change the way we act. We see positive reactions and we may repeat whatever action brought it about. From the time we are little, we are constantly seeing ourselves mirrored in other people's eyes and building the thing we call personality. We are an accumulation of all the reactions we've gotten. We think we can choose who we are, but we are largely a series of forks in the road - good reaction, one way; bad reaction, another way. It's why no two personalities are the same. They diverge as soon as we take our first action and then follow their own unrepeatable route.

I'm picturing an infinite game of Pachinko, where God drops a chip and it plinks and plunks its way down the pins of our lives, sometimes bouncing left, sometimes right, ending up making a path that is uniquely ours, and no other can follow it in the same way. Where our chip is dropped is our genetic predisposition for certain things, but where we go from there is a zillion decisions of right or left, yes or no, and random bounces based on where we've been so far.

Who am I? It is impossible to say. But you are invited to watch which way I bounce.