“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” Plato

I have spent so many years writing about myself and who I am. At the same time, I have been reading Buddhist literature, defining the complete impossibility of answering that question. This came up for me a day or two ago, because I was wondering about you, not me.

How do you define yourself? Everything written about this is always so goddamn esoteric, you are left with the unanswered question. Now, don’t get your hopes up, because there is no way I can answer it, but I can have some fun trying. There are endless ways to define yourself and certainly no uniform standard.

I think we could all agree that even if you were able to answer the question, you’d have to admit it keeps changing with time. I certainly no longer think I am the same person I was sixty years ago. Even if I had written down the response back then, which would have been a great exercise, I am no longer him.

For the past eleven years, I worked in the same place and was readily identified by others as kind of the face of the place. Well, in a few weeks, I will no longer be there and I certainly won’t identify with it. I don’t know, is where you were part of who you are? I am not talking about others perception, I am talking just about ourselves. I remember, back in my days in the Mad Men world of advertising, I was always quick to say, “I worked in the business.” 

I am certain that in my forty plus years in NYC, I thought of myself in terms of all the roles I played. They were like costumes that changed with each scene and over time. Frankly, I can’t say I really gave a shit about all that until my early thirties, when my entire world came apart at the seams. My idea of who I was felt totally external. At least, that’s how it seems, looking from all this distance away.

My life was supposed to be a certain way and I rarely wrestled with its verisimilitude. (Don’t want to kill the flow of the story, but I don’t know how many times I have told you that every now and then, I pull a word out of my ———). I felt it maybe one time, when I was living in the Ageloff Towers on Fourth Street in the East Village in the late sixties.

I was still working as a page (usher) at NBC, with a bunch of wannabe actors and artists, looking for their break in showbiz. They were all older than I was and some of them actually went on to become famous, or at least semi-famous. I rode a 250cc Honda and wore a cracked, black leather motorcycle jacket by night. I was smoking pot and wandering around the Village after dark. I was dangerously close to living an unpredictable life.

Conformity strangled me and I started wearing suits, carrying an attache case, wearing a Burberry raincoat, because I was now in the business. At times, it felt cool, pretending to be a grown up, but I was never totally at ease about it all. I could have chosen the road less traveled, but I didn’t. I married and had two children and ended up living on Long Island in a house I could not afford.

I was living on an ice cube of predictability and it started melting right out from under me. I would have to say that was the first time I actually began to think about who I was, but that is not how it felt back then. I just felt completely lost, trying to fix my world without having a single tool. I spent ten years with two shrinks and a dollop of group therapy thrown in. The best to come out of it all was not knowing who the fuck I was, which is not as bad as it sounds.

Back then, I dabbled a little bit with Buddhism and actually read one or two books on it. I tried sitting and kind of liked it. As a weekend Dad, every summer we would do something that was certainly different for my two young sons. Toward the end of my time in NYC, for two summers, I took a house that sat on a dairy farm in Honesdale, PA. I would get up early each morning and go sit out in the field, cross legged and waiting for the sun to rise. 

I was slowly beginning to circle that question. When I moved to Santa Fe, NM, I kind of became the question. I knew I didn’t want to be who I was, but I was stuck in the world of becoming. I say that, because I sincerely believed there was an answer. Along with doing more things than I can recount to make a living there, I developed a much closer relationship with the Buddha. 

I became a dedicated cushion sitter. I got involved with some of the ritual and writings. It became home for my wandering spirit, still trying to figure out who the fuck I was. What struck me as annoying is that the harder you looked for answers, the bigger the questions became.

Gotta call a time out here, lest you think this is all about me, because it is not. Obviously, I can’t tell your story, but I can lamely hope that some of you might think about your own. I am no goddamn genius and whatever I am mulling is certainly mull-able for you. If I was doing this shit for myself, I would never dream of sharing it. I am totally certain I am writing about us, OK?

The longer I have been around, the harder it is to answer and the fewer words I can think of, answer that question. Totally by accident, it came to me at the bar a few nights ago. After maybe one beer too many, as the place was emptying out, a regular asked me my favorite color. I answered, red. This began a mini-group conversation about color. They can pretty much all be replicated by combining other ones. Putting them all together, you get black. Then, what about white? 

By the way, even if my color theory is wrong, it finishes my story and that is all I give a shit about anyway. I swear I haven’t Googled for any answers, because it would only fuck up my theory, which I like. The more ways you try to define yourself, the darker it gets, eventually shutting out the light, the answer. I always get confused between metaphor and analogy, but I think I am talking metaphor, not that it matters anyway.

It’s about the color white, which can’t be “defined” by any other combination of colors. It is just white. The answer to the question I initially posed and kept tripping over myself to answer is, “I Am”. No matter when you ask yourself that question or how many times you ask it, there is only one answer.

I Am

EDITOR’S NOTE: IF SOME OF THESE STORIES SEEM SOMEWHAT REPETITIVE, THEY ARE. THE WRITER CAN ONLY WRITE ABOUT WHERE HE HAS BEEN, NOT ABOUT WHERE HE HASN’T. THE FUTURE ISN’T HERE YET, SO THERE ARE NO WORDS.

LISTEN TO IT HERE:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/admin/1292459/episodes/15750899-who-are-you