MISTAKEN IDENTITY: The River
It has occurred to me that I am not what I used to be. This is too obvious. In recent years, my knees have become as fragile as egg shells. I can hurt myself rolling over in bed. Inside I still feel like the bumbling reliable fool that I’ve always been. Yet indictment or statement of fact, the truth is that change has been my only steady companion through the years. I am now a different me. The question is am I the same me?
I do think that I am better read, of firmer opinion and with a logic based on my years of experience. Some might call my opinions and logic just a more firmly ingrained bias. Perhaps. Others would remember this bit of wisdom: ‘My good judgement is based on my experience. My experience is the result of my bad judgement.’ I have a good assortment of both judgements now.
Age being what it is I have learned to accept the things that come with it. Some more willingly than others. Nevertheless the idea occurred to me that I, in my current state, might not appeal at all to my earlier younger and more inexperienced self. If they met, what might ensue? Would they recognize one another? Would they be the same person? Would one claim that the other was an imposter? You are not me! There is a clear case of Mistaken Identity here!
Here is a thought experiment. Don’t run away. It’s not math.
In 544 BC, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” Interesting notion. Plutarch thought so when he, five hundred years later, came up with his thought experiment concerning the Ship of Theseus. This ancient Theseus was returning from war or sailing to war or bereaving a war. War, then as now, was a big deal to those leaders lacking in sufficient self-confidence. Strutting before generals and the public and not actually in battle has always been considered bravery by leaders.
Theseus sailed his ship and Plutarch wondered if he had to replace first an oar then a board and then all the boards and oars that made up the ship was it still the same ship? Wasn’t it a new one? In other words one might ask what makes that boat, that boat? Is it the constituent parts of it or rather some sense of it or is it a sense of its soul? Do boats have a soul?
Ask a sailor.
Replace all the players on my Chicago Cubs team and they remain ‘my Cubs’ do they not? So it is an entity or a concept that remains, an idea, not the players.
But the idea of a consciousness is different than the idea of a person. Are we the same person we were when we were twenty years of age? I do hope not. Would that youngster have stayed in the same room with me where he could witness my predilections, biases, and decisions now? That youth was so full of himself and his ideals and his strength. Nothing could stop him, so he thought. The 22 year old Gary would most likely have no truck now with this codger and his rationalizations, reasonings, and compromises. That youngster saw the world in blacks and whites, in honesty and lies, true or false. The older me sees fifteen shades of grey and reasons for every one of them to exist.
Having lived through my decades, I have a different opinion now of youth. But the question about identity is still a fascinating one. Replace every board in your ship, change the entire menu in your favorite restaurant, tear down every twenty years the Temple at Ise and rebuild it in just the same fashion next to the ‘original’, [They’ve been doing this in Japan since 773AD.] and the ship will still be known as the Argo; Hung Far Low’s would still be a place to remember; and the temple is always new and always ancient and always built exactly the same way. Is it not the Temple we have always known, a worshiper might ask?
Change is the only constant. Understanding that concept requires no more of us than to look up into the sky and watch the clouds move. Sometimes quickly with storms and flurries and winds that tear things up, but a large part of the time, the changes in clouds, in people, are slow and hard to notice. If we barely watch them every day, these clouds do not seem to move at all and then they are gone. So too for us.
Grab the day. Make the most of it. You will not be the same tomorrow and yet exactly who you are. Be at peace with this paradox because besides change, I believe the other constant in life is paradox. Not truth, but truths. Not absolutism, but nuance.
I would hope the old and the new me might agree on this.