"Your own acts and behaviour tell the world who you are and at the same time what kind of society you think it should be". Ai Weiwei - Chinese Artist
Imagine for a moment that you are not who you are. That you don’t have the life you have, the job you do or know the people you know. Imagine that in the next minute you will lose the entire memory of your life along with everything you know about yourself. You are a stranger to you. Then imagine that there is a large blank slate set out in front of you, a slate that can have written on it pretty much anything you want or nothing at all, your choice entirely. As you pick up the chalk and bring it closer to your bare canvas what will you write, or rewrite, perhaps rub out altogether? What would be the life you would have had if you didn’t have the one you’ve got?
You can stop imagining now and go back to being yourself again, speaking of which who might that be by the way? I’ve been thinking this week about who we feel we are and where our sense of ourselves comes from, whether it’s a natural process that slowly falls into place or if there are certain events that happen which leave their mark and change us forever. I’m sure there are many many factors which come into the mix when we’re considering how we’ve come to be the person we are, but when the analysis is over and we have figured ourselves out, how would it then be to step off the map and venture out into the territory. Once we’ve decided that we’re this way or that i.e. ‘that’s so me’ or ‘I’m not a dog person’, is there scope to change and be something we think we’re not? There are inevitably things that we cannot change about ourselves and of course plenty of things that we can, the trick is to distinguish which is which and not to confuse one with the other. History is abundant with examples of this sort of confusion where the common belief was that people were born into their positions and later bound to that particular fate. Period dramas on TV are rife with this ideology, most recently seen in ‘Downton Abbey’. Obviously where and to whom we are born is out of our hands completely but the rest is relatively up to us. We are not fixed beings; we are an ever changing, ever advancing and ever developing civilisation with abilities and capacities that infinitely outweigh even the most sophisticated technology ever created or ever will be created. We are, as human beings go, truly unique. Yet with all our originality and potential we’re also terribly good at repetitively convincing ourselves that we’re not and that we can’t do certain things because of this that and the other.
It is often said that no two people on this earth can have an identical experience of a shared event; that each person will react and feel differently about it even if the difference is only slight. Therefore our knowledge of human development, of psychological understanding and of everything we’ve come to learn about ourselves is not set in stone, it too is always changing and open to reinterpretation at any time. What a headache this can all be for us, the fact that nothing is a fact! We don’t always cope well with this; the constant shifting of information that life inevitably presents us with and so to find some much desired stability we build sturdy little boxes to help us categorise all this data and then quietly reside and pin ourselves down therein. And because we’re relational beings and don’t want to be alone, we thoughtfully create little sturdy boxes for other people too and pin them down as well. The trouble is once the boxes have been built and lived in they become very difficult to leave and even harder to demolish. When meeting someone new for the first time, we need to work out pretty fast whether we can like that person or not and if they don’t neatly fit into one of our already made boxes then we soon create a brand new one just for them and put them in it, after all it’s such a relief when things are properly filed! But our first impressions of people can tell us more about us than them. It seems that we can’t help but view others with lenses that have been shaped to fit our world, a world that is not perceived the way it is but the way we are.
Nothing in life is ever straight forward it seems and we realise this when the people we think we know actually turn out to be so much more than we first thought or saw of them. They will always outdo (and outgrow) the boxes we’ve placed them in. A box by its very nature is constrictive and restricting, it has a specific shape with room only for what fits inside. People on the other hand are fluid and embody many many facets and ways of being. I don’t mean we all have multiple personalities but that we are different selves in different situations because who we are is always in relation and in response to where we are, who we’re with and what we’re doing. I don’t chat to my clients the way I would to a neighbour and I wouldn’t attempt to offer psychotherapy to my neighbour the way I do with my clients and yet I inhabit both these ways of being, they are both me so to speak.
We can always choose to do things differently, even if that means going against our usual grain. Audrey Hepburn in ‘Roman Holiday’ illustrates this idea beautifully as she works her way through a list of ordinary things she’s always wanted to do. Whether it’s sitting in a road side cafe or getting a new hair cut, sometimes in life it’s not only important but necessary to do things just for pleasure and devoid of obligation, duty and commitment. Sometimes we all need a Roman Holiday or at least a blank slate to write our list of (fun) things to do just because we can.
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| Sunflower Seeds - TATE Modern |
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