Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is you-er than you.
-Dr. Seuss
While Socrates opined on the unexamined life, he remained mute on the over examined life. My oldest son and I share a proclivity to ruminate, so discussions with him tend to square or cube an already high constant of overthinking.
He joined me on a recent trip to Middlebury College, our shared alma mater. I was there for the spring Alumni Association board meeting; he tagged along to both keep me company and return to the campus for the first time in the seven years since he graduated.
While I sat in boring meetings in a stuffy conference room worrying about contracting Covid from the maskless participants, he roamed the campus and met with professors, retracing his steps and revisiting old haunts, taking full advantage of the uncharacteristically tropical Vermont weather. He joined me and the other board members both nights for dinner.
Chipper and conversational prior to the first, he was clammy and clammed up as we walked down the hill from the Inn to Fire & Ice on the second night. I thought better than to try to pry in the heat and humidity of the moment. But as they did in both boys’ youth – the long car ride home to Connecticut the following day proved a more fertile ground for conversation. It also gave him some time to process his feelings overnight.
The verdant Green Mountains rolled by as he described the impact of rolling back the years and rolling up to his alma mater. “I felt almost a gravitational pull back to the places where I spent the most time.” I sensed that; he left the room upon arrival to walk up the hill to the College after a 5+ hour drive while I collapsed on the bed in front of the air conditioner. It was 91 degrees.
“The college years are such an emotional pivot point in the transition to independent adulthood. I know I am technically the same person as I was then, but am I?” That query, that conundrum precipitated not only a Socratic dialogue, but exercised a gravitational pull on my own thoughts that brought me to the event horizon of my own mental black hole.
On one hand, NO. We are decidedly not the people we were ever before. I recall at the age of nine or ten, considering what I observed as adults’ excessively maudlin reactions to death. “We all die every day, don’t we?” I reasoned. Because what has passed has passed, and barring some metaphysical miracle, will neither change nor be replicated. We are, I concluded at that tender young age, only what we are at this precise moment. Time marches forward, and so do we, so we are new versions of ourselves with every tick of the second hand.
But…YES. As William Faulkner put it in Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In the time since I was nine, I’ve come to realize that we are agglomerations of all our experiences: integrated 4D people, not mere sequences of finely sliced MRI images. Everything we do, say, and experience informs not only our own psyche and development, but impacts those around us, too. This positive spin on existentialism allows us to create our own reality in every moment.
Or… NO and YES. Of course, we change over time; it would be tragicomic if we behaved exactly in the same way as we did five, ten, or fifty years ago. Various luminaries from George Cascoigne in the 15th century to Albert Einstein in the 20th have offered up some form of the adage “live and learn.” Surely wise advice, but I see it as something more subtle. Just as dreams show us that events or emotions which we barely register lodge in our subconscious, I believe we are all a complexly layered melange of ingredients, all of which we may not taste distinctly as we sup, but which would alter the flavour of the dish were they omitted.
I rode the train to New York City on a recent rainy day. I have watched the same scenery go by the windows of the Metro North Railroad on myriad trips over the 25 years that I’ve lived here. That day, though, I espied a larger-than-life butterfly yarn bombed into the chain link fence of an elementary school hardtop playground. It spread its bright, multihued wings in defiance of the dreary day.
Thank you! These questions are right in line with my current thoughts.