by Rachel Robison-Greene
Last week I spent the night at my parents’ house for the first time in over a decade. I went for a jog through the neighborhood just like I used to only now, in my forties, I prefer run tracks that are a little less angry than The Sex Pistols. Then I was feigning anger to project an aesthetic. Now the world is maddening enough. I don’t need to blast rage into my skull as I work out. Houses in the neighborhood were familiar but rundown. The trees in the woods where I used to play seemed impossibly large. Ten-year-old me would now have quite the time finding my way out. Being in the spaces of my youth was unexpectedly intense, like I had intruded into someone else’s dream.
Philosophers spend plenty of time discussing what it is to persist through time and change. Some think a person at a later time is one and the same as a person at some earlier time if the later person has the same body as the person at the earlier time. This view is viscerally tempting. My body bears the scars of falling off of my bike and sliding down a large neighborhood hill when I was nine and of a glue gun mishap while making a wreath for Mother’s Day when I was eleven. Others argue that it is a memory connection that makes a person the same person through time and change. There is something undeniably true about this too. As I moved through the streets I could have run with my eyes closed, I could almost hear the laughter of old friends and smell sprinkler water and plastic swimming pools. Those memories are indelible.
It’s reasonable to spend plenty of time thinking about persistence of identity. Living a meaningful life seems to require that we can put the pieces, separated out in time and space, together in a way that we can make sense out of. Perhaps I only understand my current craving for adventure by remembering the little girl who would jump in any body of water. Maybe my philosophical interest in justice was caused by watching peers be bullied or left out. All of these things matter because we want to understand our character traits as enduring and developed and our life arcs as the plot of a good story we’re still in the process of writing.
We spend less time thinking about the urgency, even the necessity of change. I cherish my childhood, but I can’t deny that this neighborhood is, for me in this moment, a liminal space. It feels like, if I run a block downtown, I might just stumble upon a Blockbuster Video or a teenager wearing JNCO jeans and a beanie. I can’t stay here, not in just this way. In some ways, discontinuity is as important as its more widely contemplated opposite.
Often the ways in which I am not the girl from my past or the woman from my young adulthood seem more important to me than the ways in which I resemble her. Growth requires motion. The values that matter to us the most require change.
Consider the path toward something like wisdom. We don’t attain new information by staying where we are. Knowledge changes us. All things being equal, it’s desirable to change in this way. In light of the knowledge I’ve attained, I have a different set of beliefs and am disposed to engage in different behavior from my younger self.
Authenticity requires commitment to truth, but it also requires movement away from those aspects of our former selves that feel restricting and that no longer serve us. Knowledge and authenticity are formidable companions in this way. The more I come to know about myself and the world around me, the more liberated I am to make decisions that feel authentic for me.
Love is closely related. Healthy forms of love require wanting the best for other people and for ourselves. If I love someone, I want them to be authentic and happy. When I demonstrate genuine care for another person, I want them to evolve into the best version of themselves. When I practice healthy self-love, I want the same for myself.
In no domain of my life have I found this to resonate more than in parenting. We feel intense attachment to our very young children. It strikes us as impossible that we could ever give them up. But give them up we must. We must give them, and ourselves, the freedom to become new people as they grow.
My students tend to love to debate questions related to personal identity and persistence through time. Despite the existence of countless memes on the internet, they often haven’t encountered The Ship of Theseus puzzle—during a long voyage, how many pieces of a ship would have to fall to the bottom of the ocean and be replaced before it is no longer the same ship? This question is endlessly metaphysically interesting, especially when it is applied to people rather than planks.
It strikes me that a question about the necessity of change is more existentially compelling and would be well-paired with the metaphysical one. We can ask ourselves how much similarity is required for “sameness”, but we should also ask ourselves how much difference is necessary for flourishing. Which is more important? It might be more important to flourish through change than to retain metaphysical identity through remaining the same.
It’s common to feel uncomfortable in circumstances in which we are expected to immediately adopt the roles and dynamics of much younger versions of ourselves, often versions with which we no longer identify. It can feel like we’re being asked to play a character. We appreciate the familiar, but we don’t want to pretend to be people that we are not. We want to be comforted rather than haunted by the ghosts of former selves and the places we can’t stay.
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