What We Lend Ourselves

Whenever I attend company meetings, they usually begin with some sort of icebreaker, but, most often they are just led off with a simple introduction consisting of your name, position, and years with the company. Within the context of the workplace, that seems to be what people need to know of us. It’s how we identify ourselves, at least in that setting.

But, let me ask a question: how many times have we been asked in some social setting, or upon meeting someone for the first time and getting acquainted with them, “What do you do?” Now, think about how many times you have replied to that question by giving them your job title. Then, think about how many times you have followed that up with either a brief explanation of your position or vocation, and how often it is—real or perceived by yourself, or others—a rationalization or justification for, or aggrandizement of your work.

I know I have been guilty of this, more so at certain times in my life than others. I remember when I was younger and always wanting that next rung on the ladder, I often felt like I had to explain why I wasn’t already there, or at the very least display a pride in where I was and what I was doing. Men, I think, tend to see their reflected self-image in how much we are valued in the workplace, or as a breadwinner. It’s one of the saddest norms we inflict on ourselves.

It took me years of life experience and contemplation to piece this together. But, one day, it occurred to me: I am not my job.

I am not my job. Wow! I am someone no matter what my position in the socio-economic scale of things. I am so much more than the bland and flat space I occupy to make the world go around economically. There is so much more to me, and to my life. There is so much more to life itself. What a concept.

At too late an age, it finally occurred to me that I had spent a great deal of my adult life constructing self-assigned importance and significance, based mostly on the wrong things. It was a false identity. Or it was an incomplete identity. It was a distorted mirror image. It was ignoring so many other things about what I truly was, as a person. It was denying myself of so many pleasures, both guilty and innocent. It was like living a dual life, at times, where at work I would be one person, and off work I would be someone else. At other times, I let the work persona impact and define my personal identity, and personal time, and personal actions.

It was also a part of what many of us do in order to brace and secure ourselves as what we perceive as a threatening, or overwhelming world. We school ourselves for careers, then find jobs based on compensation, and search for mates, and build families, and buy things—some needless—in order to build layer upon layer of protection between ourselves and what our culture has taught us as failure, or despair.

A job puts food on my table, and beyond that, buys me things. A mate gives me a partner with which to fight against the rest of the world, or withstand its blows. Children give me a sense of immortality, a feeling that I will live on forever even after I’ve abandoned my own mortal coil. Material things give me comfort and status, or, at least they do if I allow them to do so, or believe them capable of it.

Sometimes, I’ve even argued Maslow’s Hierarchy as a truth by which I need to live my life, that if I just accomplish this one thing and fulfill this one need, then I can move on to the more important, substantive, and altruistic levels.

My perspective on all that, however, has changed with my age. I’ve taken the time to look back over my life and have an internal dialogue about what I have liked and disliked about it. I’ve taken stock of what I have and have not accomplished which really matters—as if any of it really matters at all, because, in the end, maybe none of it really does. Our time on this earth is but a nanosecond in the eons of continuum that have come before us, and (hopefully, so hopefully) after us. In that comparison, we seem insignificant.

But, we don’t want to feel insignificant, and so we fight against it in whatever way we can. We struggle to make ourselves important in this world on some scale. And, where and when we are unable to do so with our worldly efforts, we do so in our contemplations and creativity. How long have we tried to find the meaning of life, or just of our own lives?

These days I've come to the realization that there are some things inevitable, and irreversible, and that I am powerless to stop them. I find that humbling, in a healthy and understanding way. It helps me to understand how much I do, or do not, really matter in the grand scheme of things. It helps me to accept those things I cannot change, either about the way fate works, or myself, or about others. It points me toward the beliefs of existential nihilism. I’m really not certain there is any true meaning of life, beyond that which we assign it ourselves.

That is where the questions split for me. What is the meaning of life, and what is the meaning of my life. One of those questions I may never answer: the world never has. The second is far more important to each of us, I believe, and is something I wish we would all take more time to consider. If you are like me, you’ll find it an intriguing pursuit full of as many questions as there are answers.

But, when I think about it, and at just about the point I reach the pinnacle of nihilistic thought, I think of my daughters, and remember how I’ve told myself—with sincerity—that they are the meaning of my life. When I have stated that before, I think I have really misstated my belief. Nothing I do gives my life meaning. However, everything I do does, or does not, give my life significance, and there is a vast difference between those two ideas. One would imply that I have some grandiose position in the meaning of life itself, the other, which I find more realistic, means I am important within certain contexts only. That’s not to marginalize myself, or minimize that role my life has; it is the single most important role my life will ever play. However, it is important to my daughters, and makes my own life no more valuable to myself, or others outside of my daughters.

That’s the little catch in my nihilism. I still end up stopping short of believing life is just an absurd game we play from birth to death. It’s a simple idea, possibly too simplistic for others, to believe that my meaning in life is simply in being a father, preparing the girls for facing the world on their own, and possibly living on in their memory and DNA for all my efforts. Still, it’s an attractive thought to me.

Maybe, in the inability (or absence) of being able to grasp the larger concepts, I fall back to what matters to me most, what I most hope would give value to my life. The girls represent that one thing I hope will. It’s my meaning. And nothing else that happens during my borrowed time on this borrowed planet--either because of me, or in spite of me, or all around me—can diminish that significance I assign my life in my eyes. And nothing else motivates me more.

Little Victories

I was speaking with a friend whose life is going through a bit of an upheaval. They’ve begun the long and tedious task of putting their life under a microscope, identifying the pieces that they’ve only viewed as a whole thus far, and determining what should be kept and what should be dissected out.

At the end of our conversation, my friend said something that struck a chord with me: “I know it’s a cliché,” they said, “but we all really do have to find ourselves.”

“Indeed we do,” I thought to myself.

I’ve long been fascinated by the intricate webs we weave when it comes to how we see ourselves, how we portray ourselves, and how others actually perceive us. It’s been something I’ve always wanted to write about, but I've been unable to explain or piece together on a level I hope to understand or define. It seems as difficult a question as the meaning of a life itself. Honestly, I find that frustrating.

But, for whatever I can’t understand about my identity, or its components, this much I do know: that my best life, my truest life, can only be reached through a transparency that unifies all of those three things—my perception, my reflection, and others’ perceptions of me. A difference between the three, to me, signifies a break in an important chain of integrity that I value.

These ideas about identity and one’s true self were not always important to me. Like many, I believe I spent a great deal of my life content with the distractions we accumulate and surround ourselves with in the mistaken pursuit of adding value to our lives. In fact, I think my life became something where I let those distractions define me, until I reached a point at which I experienced a dramatic change, something similar to that through which my friend is going.

During that transitional phase, I struggled to hold on to, cling to, the things that had become important to my life. For me, it seemed like a fight to keep what I thought I had earned, what I had become comfortable with, and what I thought I was, to myself and others. I fought to keep my life the “same” as possible, and I met each wave or stage of change that came at me with a countering denial of equal strength.

It took some time to realize that my denials were doing nothing more than draining my strength, prolonging my difficulties, and postponing the inevitable. I finally recognized what I was doing, came to understand why I was doing it, and then made the conscious choice to stop.

I remember that time, not as the moment at which I lost, but instead as the point at which I began letting go of the trappings I’d surrounded myself with in order to insulate myself from the external world. And, as those things began to fall away, I felt more and more released. I felt more and more freedom.

Stripped bare of those things material and emotional that had long been too important to me, I found it easier to fill my life with the simpler and less complicated things that would give me equal, and sometimes even greater, pleasure. I rededicated myself to being an even more involved father. I began writing again. I reached out to friends, and I put more effort into the quality of the relationships around me.

Yet even those things couldn’t keep all of the questions crowded out of my new life. They were only replaced with a new set of questions. Instead of asking myself why this was happening to me, I was instead left with the time and ability to ask myself about who I was, who I had become, what I had done with my life and what imprint I had made, and what I thought was the meaning of my life.

I think we all face these questions sometime in our lives, be it because of a forced course change, our age, or simply a moment of curiosity prompted by the monotony of our routine existence. We want to understand these things, I believe, in order to either validate our lives or our choices, or assign some purpose to our existence.

They can be painful questions sometimes, and they can be further complicated, or more difficult to explore, when they come at a point where you may be traveling the path solo. There is a tendency to let doubt creep in when you are in that situation, and let it add another “why” to the list.

The answers are often elusive, or are at least so for me. At times they seem as difficult as my efforts to solve the perplexities of identity, and I have to admit that I enjoy continually pondering them anyway.

And, when I can’t answer those things, or I tire of contemplating them, or I grow frustrated with some other aspect of my life, I often find myself falling back on the “little victories" of life. The gleeful abandon of my daughters’ laughs. Watching them take shape as persons. The satisfaction of seeing and bringing together a few friends for fun. Giving someone a laugh. The feeling of being healthy. The knowledge of having given something my best. Being able to compose something that expresses well. The warm embrace of a close friend. Giving back through some service to others. Listening to, or offering some small advice that helps a friend.

I don’t know if those things define me, or if, by discovering and acknowledging them I have found myself, but those are the things I carry around with me now, and that carry me.

© 2011 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.