Isn’t It a Miracle?

Isn’t it a miracle that we’ve ended up as ourselves?

My youngest sister is always trying so hard to become someone. I have tried, but I still haven’t found the right way to explain to her that no one ever really becomes a final someone. You never stop becoming. I want her to know that who you are is not a final, permanent product but an ever-growing, changing, transient thing.

I try to think back to when I was her age, fifteen years ago—a lifetime. I see me as I was then, and I can see me in her as she is now. I remember that sense of anxious wondering. I wanted to find my place in the world. I wanted to be who I was already.

What I try to tell her all the time is that by spending so much time chasing who you will become, you lose precious time being who you are. I try to tell her that she can’t be who she will become now. She can only be who she is now, and wait. That is how it will always be.

Of course, I have a lifetime of hard lessons to lean on. She can’t truly understand what I mean because the truth hasn’t happened to her yet. It takes aging and the ability to see that in every moment who you think you are is really only a thin slice of a long gradient of who you are.

Identity, I have come to see, is not a thing that can be described at any one time, but something that exists over time, perhaps even longer than a lifetime. (Perhaps, and this may be the subject of another post all together, even bigger than one person!) So much of who you are is, after all, determined by events that occur before you are born and much of who you are will live on even after you die.

Maybe that isn’t what is so hard to grasp. Maybe the hard pill to swallow is the weight of all the choices you didn’t make. All that hindsight builds up and begins to cloud our view of time, of the self, of the choices that were actually available. We carry the all the versions of ourselves we could have been and slowly, slowly come to hate the person we have become in comparison.

It’s not really a fair comparison to make. The present self can never measure up because, of course, the imagined self is always perfect. The truth is that imagined self could never have existed because nothing in nature can be perfect. The truth is, if you must make comparison, there is an equal and opposite lesser self you have risen above. The truth is, it is a miracle that each of us is anything, anyone, at all.

I don’t mean this in a purely woo-woo or spiritual way. But it’s hard not to get a bit metaphysical when you consider the sheer chances that each of us should be born, should choose one course or another, should meet and love and hate the people that we do, and that we should have self-knowledge enough to wonder about who we are, who we could have been, and that we should have further choices to become more ourselves or someone else entirely.

One thing I try to do when I find myself dwelling too harshly on what I should have done or who I should have become, is try to embody that version of myself again without the knowledge I have now and ask, my circumstances, feelings, and available choices then. Whenever I do this, I find that I did make the best choice that I could then.

I truly believe each of us is always doing our best at every moment. I think we are the best versions of ourselves we can be and a lot of what determines who we become in the next moment, the next year, the next job, relationship, place or time we end up in comes down to the tools we have and the choices available.

Another hard pill to swallow is, not all options are available at all times. There are limits of time, of money, of character, of desire. It is not possible for me to become President of the United States from here because I don’t know how; I don’t have the money or time; I don’t have the right temperament, and I certainly don’t have the desire.

What we most often mourn when we mourn who we could have been was a lack of tools, a lack of knowledge, and a lack of love. Given how little of that is available to each of us, especially in a time when we are so separated by the vast internet and in a culture that pushes stanch individualism, it truly is a miracle that we all become who we are.

I marvel at the myriad of ways a human being can come together. It’s a miracle that we are all born, that we crawl and claw our way out of childhood through a harsh human world embedded in an indifferent universe and still we find so much strength, kindness, wisdom, humor, and happiness to share.

No, you might not be the richest person or the smartest. You might, like me, make mistakes every day. You might fail yourself and fail the people you love. You probably get it wrong most days and some days you are too tired to try again. You may be afraid, you may be angry, you may be lonely and you may even be tired of this ruined life, but through all that you, like me, are beautiful and your life, like mine, is precious.

All this is simply to say, you don’t have to be anything more than what you are from moment to moment. There is no you to become. There is simply a life to live. Being one thing or another is such a small thing in comparison to the experience of becoming. Being one thing or another is only another way to settle. It’s a fraction of a life.