Up until Friday afternoon, I was planning to write a follow-up to last week’s post. I knew it would be about “thinking” generally, but I was still pondering on which image I wanted to act as a simple signpost for the basic idea — which I think may actually be difficult to capture in a snapshot image. I was gravitating towards an image from a film I have cited before (see “Do Not Read This“), yet the film actually uses a multitude of recurring images to transport the meaning I was trying to convey. When I finally selected one image, I was not completely satisfied.
But then something unexpected happened. It was almost as if the image I had selected gave me a new insight into a phenomenon I find much more important — and this is now what I wish to talk about today. I have strong intuition that these ideas are all intricately intertwined, and I am somewhat taken aback by the obvious fact that the image comes from the world of magic. 😯
Let me take a moment to state my gut feeling — that I really don’t know exactly where the idea that somehow just precipitated in my mind came from. The idea itself has a lot to do with existentialism … and I have read quite a few texts from existentialist philosophy, from Kierkegaard to Camus. It also has something to do with identity … and here I am not sure if the stuff that I know from linguistics is related or not (though I have a strong hunch it might be). Perhaps if I simply point out the perhaps most poignant sign that all of a sudden simply sort of imposed itself on my mind, it may become clearer what I am talking about in the first place.
So here it goes. I have always considered my father (RIP) to have been a very accomplished person. His life was a little bit of a “rags to riches” story, and there were both many chapters of very hard work involved, but also a few cases of being at the right place at the right time (plus the know-how in order to take advantage of those opportunities). While I am still very proud of my father to this day, my reflections on his life over the past few days have been strongly influenced by the insights I had about existence, existentialism and identity.
My father’s existence was very much based in an extremely strong work ethic. His ability to provide for his family was likewise strongly based on the fruits of his labor. My father very strongly identified with his roles as a “worker” (which I put in quotes simply because his success allowed him to climb to the top rungs of many corporate ladders he came into contact with) and as father. What has all of a sudden become very clear to me is the degree to which a large portion of his identity was lost when he retired from work and then ultimately also when he lost his wife (our mother). After these two monumental blows to his existence, my father slowly but surely became lost, having been robbed of the two pillars which a large part of his existence was built upon.
There are some things all humans share existentially — the air we breathe, the sun in the sky, a limited lifetime and so on. There are other things we choose — our career paths, the things we believe, the relationships we maintain and so on. Our own sense of identity is intricately intertwined with these constructs we link to our own existence. When a pet owner loses his or her pet, they also lose their own existential role as owner (and care-taker and similar relationship roles).
Perhaps one of the most fundamental aspects of our own identity is our sense that each of us — each of our selves — is a self that is important to someone or something. Weird — just as I wrote that I was reminded of an old song by the rock-band Kansas called “Dust in the Wind” … and without such self-worth attributed to us by others we are perhaps indeed little more than dust in the wind.
Yet the world we live in is a very complex space, and there are a vast number of constructs surrounding us in our environments, our habitats, with which we can construct a multitude of meanings in life, a wide ranging and incredibly tangled web of relationships are possible … just waiting to be built up … in the hope of never ever being torn down.
Every now and then it seems essential for me to get carried away following such wide ranging tangents across the universe. But now let me bring it back to the image for this post. As a “homework assignment”, I invite you all to speculate what I had initially intended to write for this week’s post, and maybe you will be rewarded with a matching solution in next week’s post! 😀
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