Becoming

Do you ever stop a second from your daily life and check back on what has happened and how you have become who you are now? The past and the the present are linked by a combination of events outside our control but also systematic decisions we have taken along the line that have reinforced our destiny. In a way it's a bit like becoming fat: it doesn't happen from one day to the next, but it is the result of systematic choices that we have made over a period of time. This might be compounded by things outside our control (e.g. low metabolic rate and all that) but ultimately we are the people that ate all the pies. Strangely we tend not to acknowledge this, and think about life as an unpredictable evolution of events, people we meet, things that happen. Perhaps there is too much to take in, and we simplify things in such a way that we take in very little.

If we take a step back and look at the 'deterministic' side of our life we might discover something very interesting about ourselves. One of these is that what we define as the 'loss of innocence' (the process by which we become less idealistic and innocent as we grow older) is actually quite the opposite: we become more innocent (i.e. free from wrong) over time, for we now would make less mistakes and self defeating systematic choices that we did in the past. In other words our younger selves were much more capable to make choices resulting in pain for themselves and others than our current selves. Ignorance leads us to trial and error. The younger we are, the more areas we need to discover. In doing so we are not Innocent, just blind.

This is a positive interpretation of growth, of becoming. As I said before we grow when we fulfil our potential. In doing so we become more free from wrong.

If I look at the myself on that very first flight to London when I was about to turn 20, and the myself now that is about to turn 30 (I bet you can tell which is which! ah ah) it comes to my mind all the choices, the mistakes, the lessons that 19 year old person was about to learn. He would look for happiness in the wrong places, he would get hurt, he would hurt others along the way, he would make necessary systematic choices. In so many ways I am more innocent now than I was back then, especially if you consider the place I was coming from. I wonder what the 40 year old me will think of me now, whether he will stop and check back on his own becoming.