The Daily Novel

………….towards becoming who we already are.

Early on in the journey we are learning to become someone different. Wordsworth honed in to the negative side of this when he wrote: ‘Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy.’  Schools, and to some extent all education, teach us to conform to the requirements of the outside world.

This trend is accentuated when we join the world of employment. We take on the roles of soldiers, accountants, managers, teachers, shopkeepers, plumbers, comedians, etc. The comedian’s job is the saddest of all. Because the comedian is expected to make people laugh, even when he is off-duty. Even when he is feeling sad or depressed. Tony Hancock knew all about that.

Occasionally comedians manage to transcend this difficulty. In the popular BBC radio comedy show of the 1940s, Tommy Handley’s Monday Night at Eight, there was a character called Mona Lot, whose catch line was: ‘It’s being so cheerful that keep’s me going.’ Delivered in a sombre tone it was the trigger for gales of laughter from the studio audience.

When we become parents the trend away from our real selves continues. Human infants have a far longer period of helplessness than any other species. It is many months before they can take any food other than the milk from the breast or the bottle. It takes years for them to learn to walk and talk. They are not able to fly from the nest when a few days old. Some human infants are still having difficulty leaving the nest, even when they become old enough to have their own children.

Human infants need parents who are absolutely dependable. Correction, in the words of  Winnicott, they need to be ‘good enough parents’. But even being a good enough parent requires the human being to temporarily suppress his own feelings of fear, helplessness, depression. It requires him, or her, to be there for the child, even when the inner urge of his own being wants to be off doing something entirely different.

The long journey back to the real self probably begins as the children grow up. And when, economic circumstances permitting, we can change our work roles, towards something more suited to our ‘real’ selves. And when we retire, so long as we have a decent pension, we are free at last to be ‘ourselves’. But even then the journey is not an easy one.

The biggest obstacle to change is the reaction of the people we know best. Our friends are our friends because of who we were. If we change they can no longer depend on us. And, of course, that is even more true of our children even after they have established themselves as independent human beings living their own lives. Parents, cannot get on with the next stage of their own journey until they fully relinquish their fathering and mothering roles.

Switch to metaphor number two.

Life is a journey. At every junction on the road, and we come to new junctions. Every day of our lives, we have a choice. Which ever road we choose changes our direction in life, and, above all changes us. We become different people because who we are is the sum of our personal biographies.

We change more at each junction if we take what Robert Frost called ‘the road least travelled’. That road is not a tarmac highway. It is an unmade up path, where we may fall into huge pot-holes, where we may encounter swamps or quick sands, where we may lose our way, because there are no signposts. If we survive we become someone very different, someone we never dreamt of becoming.

You will not like these contradictory metaphors unless you enjoy paradox. And if you don’t enjoy paradox, you probably should not be reading this blog.

And now the lights have to be put on the Christmas tree.