fallen verses

I’ve stayed up rather late tonight. It’s okay, I suppose, because I don’t have to work tomorrow (yay!), so sleeping past 8 am won’t get me into any trouble.

I was… am… up late because I was reading. Looking for Alaska by John Green. Despite the fact that it was “young adult” fiction it was really good. I’d suggest it wends its way onto everyone’s reading lists.

And, as books are wont to do, it left me thinking. Yes, it was about high-school students. Yes, they smoked illegally and drank Strawberry Hill citrus wine and those are things I never do*. But those are just details. It ends up a story about human interaction.

As we get older we back away from experience, I think. Some of it is repetition: been there, done that, got the t-shirt and all. Some of it we judge before we experience it based on previous experiences. We shape ourselves by the experiences we have and our responses to those experiences. Who we are then influences what happens in the future and how we react. We fall into this endless cycle of experience and response that leaves us absolutely certain of who we are.  After all, we have crafted a world based on and reinforcing that notion that the “Me of this moment” is the “Me that must be.”

I don’t think that’s true, though. I believe we all have a vast capacity to choose who we are and who we are to become. In people not yet jaded by experience, they have no choice but to explore those questions. Sometimes the answers are surprisingly good, sometimes horrendously bad. But the ignorance, the naïveté of youth allows those questions to be answered in unexpected ways. It’s being able to play the “what-if?” game without a hint of irony because those ifs are all possible, and not crossed off the board based on predetermined definitions of identity.

We can only be who we are, no more, no less. But I think most of us don’t know ourselves as well as we think we do. I challenge the world: next time you are confronted with an option and you are going to dismiss a choice because it’s silly or “not me,” look carefully at it. Ask yourself if maybe you’re wrong. Try to see the world through your eyes as if it was newly formed and a world of possibilities was laid out before waiting to come into being. Because they are.

*I’ve never smoked illegally**, though I have drank Strawberry Hill. I don’t at all recall how it tasted.

**Dammit, I have. On the plus side, I don’t believe my parents read this. Not that they’d really care about a couple of cigars over a decade ago. It clearly has not become a habit.