“A person is a perpetual ongoingness perpetually mistaking itself for a still point. We call this figment personality or identity or self, and yet we are constantly making and remaking ourselves. Composing a life … is the work of continual revision, not toward greater perfection but toward greater authenticity.”
Maria Popova, The Marginalian
I tend to think of myself as a stable entity; solid, steady, durable. The illusion is strong because of the deep fissure running through me that goes all the way back. My earliest memories carry the recognizable strain of a personality, a personhood I still feel today, the image of who I think myself to be.
It’s not a complete illusion, like one created by the conjurist who makes an elephant disappear. The personality is real enough, it’s just that it’s the lesser part of me. My worries, irritations, preferences, the clothes I choose, how I flavor my food, the mirror glance to check my hair – these are ephemera. Even the things I think are important (and they are important, within their sphere), my beliefs, convictions, my sense of right and wrong, my dreams, my longings, these are outer reflections of an inner brightness. And I cling to my reflections tightly.
My ongoingness is discomforting. I don’t like that I am mostly a fluid constellation of moving parts, like the constellations I see at night, whose names give the illusion of a fixed image to stars that are hurtling through space. Incrementally, but inevitably, their shape will change. In a thousand or a million years, they will be altered into something else. And on a smaller scale, so will I, despite my clinging.
The still point is not the point. I did not enter the stream of life to arrive at a personality that was a collection of right answers. If life is an examination, it is not true-or-false; it’s an ever expanding lab experiment to a question that keeps evolving. My growth accelerates if I can engage my discomforts, loosen my hold on the fixed image I have of the bursting elements within me, and let the movements of the kaleidoscope proceed. There is information in the field I cannot see when I hold so fast to what I think I know.
Photo by Johnny Kaufman on Unsplash