At the end of every summer, as the school year arrived, I would tell myself how much I'd changed since the last year. How much cooler I'd be, for whatever reasons, and how much it would impress others. Then I'd find myself re-immersed in the day to day social and academic world of school, and realize that, for the most part, I was the same.
A similar process happens when I reflect on certain philosophical and spiritual ideas. At times, I will feel I've reached some sort of revelation, a new way of seeing the world and myself. But as time goes on I will find my overall perspective unchanged.
This isn't something I'm realizing now, though. After a couple of school years without significant growth in coolness, I'd say to myself: Yeah, I thought I was cool going into those last few years, but this year is totally different and I have a whole new perspective. Then I'd start to think that reflecting on one's coolness isn't very cool, and so I'd just let things ride. Be cool. Still, I was the same.
In my deeper reflections, I'd tell myself that constantly seeking progress in great leaps only held me back from further progress. Then I'd try to progress by letting go of my desire to progress.
I can't believe that I'm alone in this type of thinking. Rather, I assume that most people do it. Or at least most people under the same cultural influences as me, because I think that my culture creates this conception progress and growth. I'm not, however, referring to the obsession with get-rich-quick schemes or revolutionary diets. Rather, it's in our stories, our histories and myths. Here we have flashes, sudden revolution and invention and enlightenment that changes everything.
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2 comments:
You mention our cultural venue as a driver for this introspection on personal growth. Consumerism often makes folks think that a new gadget will transform their lives, make them cooler, more capable, more creative, more productive. When it doesn't, they seek a new gadget or sometimes a new "lifestyle, as though changing your life was as simple as changing your clothes.
While we all change as we age and gain the perspective of experience, there is an inner core of being that feels very permanent, that it does not, and will not, nay, can not change. It may be illusory, but as Gertrude Stein said, “We are always the same age inside.” I always misquote her as saying we are all 18 inside, probably because my permanent inner core was established sometime between 18 and 25. It think it is what was once called maturity, a word that is less meaningful today as we have blurred the demarcations of infancy, childhood, adolescence and adulthood.
Knowledge and wisdom are the things that continue to grow, whether you reflect on them or not. As experience accumulates, so does discrimination. You begin to recognize patterns, one of our inherent, and fabulous human abilities. We constantly rearrange our memories as we ruminate. Sometimes the pattern recognition produces an "Aha!" moment, those rare times when all the puzzle pieces fall together, solved. Sometimes it produces the Muse, and a wellspring of pure expression pours out, the essence of art.
I am often complimented on my memory for past events, especially when I elicit a shared memory with a family memebr. I know that my memory is no better than most people's. The secret is that I retell the stories, and so recement them in memory. But this also means I embellish them in the remembrance and retelling, as they are focused through the prism of my experience.
The suddenness happens in recognition, in confluence, in coincidence, in happenstance. Life has a beginning and an end and a lot of punctuation in between, but it is a continuous narrative, authored without the benefit of an editor.
You probably were getting cooler every year. The problem is that everyone who was already cooler than you also got cooler by about the same degree so it didnt really seem any different. Are we talking about college or high school here? Because I don't think high school or college kids are very cool at all.
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