Who Am I? (Does It Matter)?
I am what I am seems final enough but really says nothing. That seems to characterize a lot of what we say or do or think. Can something ever be nothing? I guess not. But what, of all our somethings, are ever important? Now that is scary. We put a lot of time and effort into our lives and yet, everyday on a highway, or big city, or wherever there are huge crowds, we are reminded that amongst all these nondescript nobodies we too, from the perspective of all the others, are just a Nothingburger. If we died at the moment, the world would hardly notice, hardly care, hardly be the less of for it, and after one generation even memories of us would be extinct. In that respect we have been hoodwinked---life is a farce.
Of course to each of us life is hardly a farce. To each of us our lives mean a lot---like everything. The basic trouble with life is it has no permanence and we change throughout our lives. Who we are today is not who we were yesterday and certainly not many yesterdays ago. My memory of real young days is not as good as that of many others. When I was a youngster it was tough to know which end was up and thanks to a different era I was free to commingle with all sorts of characters. Even when like 7 or 8 it was like "be sure to be home by supper" as I went out the door. My best friend in those early years was my dog Buff. He would listen to my young babble, he liked to wrestle to see if he could get my hat, and I taught him a lot of cool tricks which mainly involved bothering others---like going from bus stop to bus stop and grabbing kids lunches or hats and running in circles with it to taunt them. Well, it was funny to me. Buff loved to roam and we sure did---everywhere was an adventure. The trouble is, his roaming range was like 3 miles and his funny ha-ha's would get him a ride home in a police car. Trouble was, he thought that was neat too. The relationship imploded when my parents were forced to give him to some farmer far away. I don't know that I ever fully recovered from that.
Quickly I learned a lot of life is loss. I know, the important thing is to try, but the goal is to win. There is often little choice so we learn throughout life to cope with losses---we all can't be a Terrell Owens and bulldoze our way to the top. Cope! What a useless word. You survive losses, you don't cope. I don't ever accept the loss of anything, I just regret the loss and that regret is forever. With every loss a little bit of yourself dies in the process. In the early years the growth is faster than the losses, but as time goes on the losses exceed any growth.. If you live long enough you have little left to lose.
Kids today are micromanaged, often their day is programmed for them, and the parents know their whereabouts every minute of the day. With cell phones the contact must be insufferable. It is no wonder that for many kids today their closest friends, their best friends, their most constant companion, are one or both parents. Is that good? Beats me. In my day your friends were your friends and your parents were your parents and the two roles didn't get too mixed up. Your parents set limits and it was a given that your mother didn't approve of hardly anything you thought was a good idea. You had all the opportunity to fall on your face, and you did, and then your parents would say 'I warned you'. But you never were convinced they knew as much as you did. And you sure as hell didn't tell them all that you knew about a lot of things.
In my case my mother worried about everything, wanted to control everything, and my dad was more laid back and preferred I learn from experience. "He knows better and has to learn for himself or be a failure in life." My mother valued control, my father valued independence. My neighborhood friends were the ones with whom I molded my own unique personality. Fortunately they were a perfect assemblage of playmates for me. Each of us brought out the best in the others, and everything we did seemed awfully important although for the most part none of it was much more than adolescent nonsense. Those friendships lasted a long time, for many decades. Of course people change with time and with the changes come a loss of current relevance. Any group can only rehash old times up to a point and with little 'new' times on the docket, it becomes more and more like old high school reunions---reflections of a past long since gone. Life is a lot of good memories and good byes.
Aside from my close neighborhood friends I had intersting chapters of life with some diverse characters. All of us are characters, so to me that word is not slander. I learned early on that diverse characters are interesting to be around and I learned things. Is it important to learn these things? I don't know, how important are most things we learn? I became friends with a kid named Charlie from Crotonville, the bad part of town and my dad would drop me off to spend the day with Charlie. That crowd had a whole different set of values, priorities, and attitude than others from my part of town. I guess fortunately for me Charlie didn't really drag me around much with the Crotonville crowd but he told me the kind of things they did, a lot of which was bad behavior like stealing and sexual things. I knew these kids from school but not really, they kept to themselves and I kept to myself. One of them attended my Sunday School but he was out of his element there. No one in the church, including the minister, mixed with him, so the kid was just present. I remember once the electricity went off in the church for a while and he took the opportunity to feel up one of the girls in the class. Back then, stuff like that happened and no one would report it. Once I heard he disrobed a fat girl in the alley behind the movie theatre. I didn't know what to think. He really did? Wow. And he got away with it? Amazing. Another not real close friend in my neighborhood, the poor area, had a girlfriend with huge breasts and he used to drop quarters down her blouse and fish them out with his hands. I guess she really needed a friend and despite the inappropriateness of the friendship it seemed to be a real friendship. I never knew what to make of this stuff then, and still don't today. Sex was difficult to comprehend back then and no more comprehendible today. Human sex might just reflect God's sense of humor. Then there was a Jewish friend who was another friend I sometimes visited. I was shocked to find his parents walked around the house naked. I tried to pretend I didn't notice or wasn't shocked. Life can surely be diverse.
Another friend from the neighborhood, who was closer to me than anyone else, was smart, but kind of mean-spirited and odd. I don't know what odd means, we all are odd. He would make little home made bombs and wired up a chair so he could shock his brother; halloween was his favorite so he could throw rotten tomatoes all over the place, etc. Once I told a close friend's mother that this odd guy had put a bomb in her woodpile and she grabbed a broom and hit him over the head with it, telling him never to come in her yard again. I thought that was funny. About as funny as the time my good friend and I threw our bikes together to make a lot of noise and then my friend stood next to his bike all covered with ketchup. His mom had a near heart attack. The truth is his mom was the best friend a group of neighborhood kids could have. We always met at her home because we could be ourselves and her presence was no threat to us. She seemed to understand kids and was amused by our meaningless banter, dumb behavior, and endless boredom. The daily question for us kids back then was, "What do you want to do?" It might take two hours of debate to decide, but whatever it ended up being, we took it seriously and had fun. We learned that even doing nothing could be fun. Things are different today. KIds get their fun from the internet and TV. We had a TV too, but just one back in those days and you watched what the family agreed to watch. Most of it was garbage by today's standards but we loved it. Maybe we were just a bit retarded back in those days.
Some things were the same, like it was cool to smoke and get drunk. Fortunately, I chose to smoke those small plastic tipped cigars thinking that made me look more gangster like than I was. It fooled no one. Adolescent emotions and alcohol made for times which at the time seemed wild and exciting, mostly hilarious. I think if I were around myself and my friends at that time now, when everyone was drunk or high, I would find it pathetically boorish. But that is youth. Behave like, talk like, and be a dumb ass is always the height of coolness for the young. At an older age we just behave like, talk like, and be a dumb ass in more subdued and polished ways---a more professorial dumb ass. Of course neither age group is fooled by the other. A dumb ass of a different color is still a dumb ass.
Be all this as it may, we spend so much of our youth trying to figure out who we are, then during our productive years we believe we know exactly who we are, and then in the terminational years we end up wondering once again who we are, and even worse, whether it matters at all. There is a lot of truth to the observation if you live long enough you will become twice a child. I think the truth is that we are what we are only at particular moments in time. Change is always the operative word in our life. We are not even, at the same age, the same person in different situations. One of the enigmas of even thinking about an afterlife is which of our personas in life would exist in any afterlife? What age mentality would we have? Which friends or pets or whatever would we have? Which spouse would you have? Would you still dislike the same people? Okay, of course those you don't like won't be there. These are all dumb questions with no smart answers.
I guess I think I know who I am even though I really am not capable of knowing the answer. Neither are others since others will differ widely on who I am---you know, the real me. I remember some TV show in which the host would say at the end, "Will the real _______ step forward". If things change perpetually how can there ever be a real me? No one is the same person at 70 as they were at 20. So which one is the fake? I supported the Vietnam War and would never support such a thing again. So which is the real me? I will leave the world and all the DNA molecules which made up the real me will still be on earth. But I will not be. So who the hell then am I? If we are not the sum total of all our DNA molecules what else can we be? There must be another dimension to life which is beyond our comprehension. I wonder what percent of anything in life is ever within our capabilities to comprehend? If you know more than me that probably isn't saying much. Neither of us really knows much at all.
So who am I? After all these years I still am not sure. I guess just part of the current state of evolution. Do I matter? Well, I guess as much as you matter. Does anyone matter? In one sense all participants in God's evolutionary process matter. If you are going to take a deck of cards and keep throwing them on the floor until they all line up a certain way then I guess each card matters. Evolution is a function of the genetic spinning wheel. We are all cogs in the wheel. The game can hardly be played if the only cogs are the winners. Most of us are basically losers, but the few winners can't be winners if the rest of us are not in the game. You are somebody if you took the cards dealt you and managed to enjoy a productive life. You are an ethical somebody if you managed, in the process, to make life better for those with whom you came in contact. Mine is not an ethical life if I look back and see victims strewn in the wake of my path. I and my body are not the same. And the I keeps changing. When the body fails to house the I, where did the I go? There are dimensions of life here beyond my grasp. Fair enough, one less thing to worry about, one less voluminous musing to write. Time for a nap.
Nap over and I knew when I started this little treatise nothing brilliant would emerge. But every treatise needs some sort of conclusion. So who am I? Who are You? For me, whatever I believe, it has to be based on logic and/or fact. We know enough facts about evolution now that clearly humans have arrived on the scene via the evolutionary process. There is zero evidence for any direct creation. The earth and life on the earth exist. For every gift there has to be a gift giver and in this case the Creator of this evolutionary process I call God. The process is brilliant and the progress over eons of time ever so amazing. Whether God ever overrules the laws of evolution is purely speculative. I don't see much evidence for it. If you get shot through the head you die. No sense blaming God for not intervening and it would be inane to suggest God singled you out to get shot. So we ought to quit mumbling that God acts in mysterious ways and your getting shot was God's will. God's will is not running evolution. The process and the laws governing that process run evolution, God just created the process.
I am sure, back as a teenager, when I did the only athletic thing of much merit and set the course record on a crosscountry course, I probably thanked God for giving me the ability to run fast for a long time in order to accomplish this. That is so self centered. Evolution is driven by chance and then survival of the fittest takes over. The notion that God looked down upon this earth and said to me "You know, I have picked you out to run faster and longer than others so you can set the course record" is just illogical. My friend from Crontonville got killed in a car accident in his late teens. God didn't single him out to die that way. I have a cousin dying a slow ghastly death from a wasting muscle disease and God did not single her out to die this way. We ought to quit treating God as some sort of American Idol contest judge.
Thus, by chance in God's created evolutionary process, and driven by the laws of evolution I arrived alive on this earth. The rest was genetics, environment, and luck. What I, and other humans have, that other animals do not have, is a strong innate ethical being. We know, in varying degrees, right from wrong. Evolution is less cruel to other animals because they have no concept of death. I tend to get attached to animals in nature or as pets and it pains me to realize, for example, how a favorite deer in the forest is likely to meet their death. But I force myself to realize death is so much more terrifying for humans because we understand the consequences of injury. I have suffered few traumatic injuries in my life, but once I was konked over the head with a piece of concrete in an attempted robbery. While it required a lot of stitches at no point was it the pain that was overbearing. Rather it was the thoughts of whether I would bleed to death or become unconscious, or was I dying etc. Other animals don't have these advanced concepts with which to deal in times of injury. That is why empathy is an ethical necessity for humans thrown into this evolutionary process. Without empathy, the evolutionary process is very cruel to the human species. Of course the fittest will survive and the evolutionary process continue, but for the first time there is a need to protect the unfit, as best we can, from the misfortunes assigned to their role in this process. To alleviate unnecessary suffering among humans is justice and there is no justice without empathy. Thus, whatever else I might be or have achieved at any point in my life is controlled by the laws of evolution except my empathy toward others. This may be the only essence of ourselves which we can say we earned. Thus, I am what I am, and most of it is of little note, except for my empathy, and that is self developed for the most part, and the real measure of anyone from an ethical standpoint. In that sense we have a purpose in life and that is to help others along the way, to protect the vulnerable, to share with those in need, to comfort those in distress, to understand those different from ourselves. In the end that's all we can hope to understand.
