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.

Depth Perception

What if we could, when it matters most, suspend our disbelief in order to see things with more clarity?

Doing so is difficult. Take, for instance, the philosophical theory about the differences or parallels of perception and reality. It may very well be that reality is only that which we personally perceive—kind of like the idea that a tree falls silently in a forest without there being anyone there to hear it. Most would say that the tree does indeed make an audible sound in its fall, but we can also grasp the feasibility of that concept enough to lend its inception some credence.

That idea extends even further, however, with those who posit we actually only live in a dream state and that our reality is simply a perceptually constructed one, the premise of Poe’s quote that “all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” Most people jump off the bus at this juncture; it is a little frightening for us—science fiction kind of frightening—to imagine that our reality is neither tangible nor true.

Like most people, I exit at that same point. I rationalize it (now, and as I did once before to the frustrations of my philosophy professor) with the argument that countless beings would all have to be constructing the interactions between ourselves and the realities and different outcomes that arise from those interactions. We would all have to be dream-state constructing the same world, and determining and perceiving all the variables the same way, and all accepting them as our personal and shared truths. Either that or (and I shudder at this thought) everyone and everything in our world is simply a creation of our imagination. That seems even more inconceivable.

But honestly, when I do that, when I argue that, I am really only using logic to fend off my fears. I am afraid that what I want to believe is both real and true, because admitting that it isn’t, or even just allowing the smallest of doubts about it to creep in, would shake the very foundations of everything else about me and my life. If X is not true, then certainly Y may also be false because Y is related to X, and so on and so on, until all the dominoes are laying on their side. Chaos.

Interestingly enough, thoughts along those lines took me back to a time when I was trying to examine and salvage a faltering relationship, and took to books by experts to find ways to attempt this. One of the more interesting books I found (the authors of which I cannot give credit…it was long ago burned) made the point that when couples argue they argue from positions of fear and defensiveness.

A simple example: if my wife/girlfriend and I would argue about why I didn’t manage to take out the trash that week, we would both be retreating to our defensive corners and trying to protect the most basic ideas we have about ourselves and our realities. My not taking the trash out would represent to her my disregard for her feelings by doing something she hoped I would do, which in turn would mean that I do not care about her needs, and meant I did not value her as a person or care about her, which also meant she was not a person worth caring about, either by me or by anyone else.

Likewise, I might be feeling that her initial request was her asking me to do a demeaning and menial task, that her calling me out on it meant she was willing to hurt my feelings, or to call into question my skills or abilities as a partner (or a partner who is capable of caring and courteous acts). I might be thinking she meant I was not a good mate for her, or anyone else, and thus, a less worthy person.

In an argumentative and self-protective game of Six Degrees, we would both end up raising the stakes over a silly bag of trash and turning the entire thing into a war to ward off our most basic fears of self-perception and self esteem.

That book went on to offer ways of working around this, but my girlfriend at the time never read the book, and the application of their advice must have escaped me. At least it did then.

No, check that: I think it still has.

I know this because of a recent conflict in my life with people important to me. As it was happening, as it was building to a ridiculous crescendo, I could feel within myself both anxiety and fear building to levels that clouded my interpretations of others’ words and deeds, and it was only in my understanding of this in myself that I began to realize it was what was prompting the same within them. We had all retreated and raised our hackles and bared our claws in a display of primal instinct.

Once I could recognize that, it became easier to understand the actions, but did not make the resolution and reconciliation any easier, because that meant that one or both of us would have to be humble enough to admit some wrongdoing and reach out to each other. Just like with couples, this is probably the hardest step.

In retrospect, what I learned about myself in all this was that I may have been (or still am) a little hypocritical of my mantra to “seek first to understand, then to be understood.” At some point in the process my emotions took over and they short-circuited the Six Degrees process I needed to think through in order to understand my gut reaction, or—just as importantly—their actions and reactions. If I had been adept at doing so, whether they had been or not, I might have helped steer things in a different direction, or been humble enough to see things through their eyes and agree to disagree in a manner that would not have been destructive or damaging.

And that doesn’t have to apply to my closest of relationships either; it works for acquaintances and friends and peers at work as well, if I care enough to be the kind of person to try and apply it. It might make things a little easier at work, or relieve a little of the stress that so often comes with the holidays and time with family, or possibly even ease the tensions that seem to build during election cycles. I don’t necessarily have to attempt this as a means of respecting or caring about someone else more; it might be something I want to do for myself in order to be a better person.

Which will, in turn, probably make me a more likable or lovable person to others. Which will then tell me that I am indeed a good person. Which will then tell me that my foundation of self esteem is a little more solid, and that my perception of myself is a little more real and true.

See how that works?

© 2010 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.