What makes us who we are?
I read a blog this morning which really started to get my mind running around inside of its shell. It was talking about a woman who had Alzheimer and their loved one looking on and the look of confusion and sense of loss on their faces. The slow insidious leaching of the persons memories till they wandered around in the world unable to recognize the people around them, unable to know what makes them essentially them, but the loved ones still loving the person. But, what makes them loveable? Each and every one of us has gone through life and ‘loved’ someone with everything that we are, whether it is a close friend (BFF) or it is a lover, and we have also felt that loss and confusion as the relationship ended, the person changed, where once was love now is hate or even worse disinterest. What is it that allows us to continue to love someone who does not know us, yet can’t continue to love someone who is still ‘sentient’?
In all my close friendships that I thought we would be in each other’s lives till the end of time, the end was not for lack of ‘nothing’ but more for the person starting to do damage to the other. At that point when they start to affect the essential ‘us’ where they start to damage our own identity and tatter our souls. Then you end up leaving to preserve your essential self.
But, what makes us who we are? Have you ever met someone and felt the ties that bind the souls together, the instant recognition? You do not know why or how or who they are, but there they are and you know that they are important to you, that energy, that resonation of two souls on the same frequency. You may only have met them for a minute, a heartbeat or a breath before you are parted again and sometimes you are lucky enough to know them for a lifetime.
Is the loved one who is looking on the person who has lost their sentient self, still resonating with the person’s energy or are they remembering past thoughts of the person that cannot be destroyed as there is no thought of destruction from the person? Does love exist regardless of the material person and is it always there at the soul level and we are all just struggling to understand the world that we are living in now? When sometimes it would be easier just to feel rather than think?
What makes us who we are?
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The Blog that started me thinking:
At the end of the film A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT, after many struggles and setbacks the heroine is reunited with her adored fiancee. The only problem is the lover has suffered a grievous head wound that erased all of his memory. When they are reunited, he doesn’t know who she is. In Julie Christie’s recent film AWAY FROM HER, she plays a woman with Alzheimer’s Disease who gradually loses her memory and with it her ability to recognize her husband of many years. At the end of both stories the ones “left behind” look at their partners with equal amounts of longing and confusion because there they are right in front of them, but no, they aren’t “there” at all any more. In both cases it brings up the essential question– what makes us who we are? Our physical selves? Our memories? Our ties to other people? Our achievements (including our children)… Other, perhaps more ineffable/undefinable things? It’s stuff for a serious ontological discussion (or philosophy class), but also an intriguing question that can be batted back and forth across the ping pong table of your own mind when you’re in the bath tonight: what makes me who I am? If you took away this or that (my memory, or my sense of humor, or my eyesight, for example) would I still be me? Or would the loss of such things disappear me?
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