Last Updated on July 31, 2013 by James Dziezynski
“Don’t worry about wanting to change; start worrying when you don’t feel like changing anymore. And in the meantime, enjoy every version of yourself you ever meet, because not everybody who discovers their true identity likes what they find.”
~ ANTONY JOHN
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
~ KURT VONNEGUT
The buff, college-aged guys rotating in and out of the batting cages looked pretty bummed when a long-haired dude with Teva sandals asked to jump in the mix. Despite being surrounded by fiberglass polka-dotted hippos and towering plastic giraffes from the nearby mini-golf course, it was all business in the cages. Reluctantly, I was granted a slot in the rotation, even though I was using the facilities’ battle-worn aluminum bat and my batting glove was an overly-padded belay glove designed for rock climbing.
Stepping into the cage, I automatically followed the rule burned into my brain since little league: bunt the first one. And then, I start hammering every pitch that comes whirling out of the pitching machine.
If you’ve played baseball at a competitive level, the 75 – 80 mph balls offered from a recreational pitching machine are actually pretty slow, despite the intimidating thud they make against the backstop pads when a batter misses a pitch. Add to that they have no tricky movement on them and the balls are made of hardened rubber, meaning they jump off the barrel of the bat with enhanced velocity.
Once it was obvious I could hit, the guys waiting their turns softened a little bit. After a few rounds, one of the guys asked me how I was getting around so quickly and consistently driving the ball. It was a cool moment because I certainly wasn’t trying to show them up. I actually did have some advice for them – I had seen some obvious but correctable flaws in the way they locked their wrists rather than turning into the pitches and one fellow simply needed to snap his hips earlier to generate more power and pull the ball.
My point is: I played baseball. And I was pretty good, despite being chronically undersized in relation to my peers growing up. I could always make good contact, I could read pitch movement and had good reflexes. But like so many other endeavors in life, right when I started to really get good, when talent needed hard work and discipline to evolve, I succumbed to the blanket statement that I was too small to play ball and my identity as a baseball player faded from my life.
There have been a lot of identities I’ve undertaken over the years. I loved skateboarding until an ankle condition permanently took me out of the game. For years I played and then worked as a musician and to this day, I have friends who are surprised I’m doing little with my guitars these days. In contrast, I have friends I know from the hiking and writing world who are stunned to learn I am a decent musician, or that I played baseball.
Many of us wander from identity to identity and I must admit envy towards those individuals who are able to lock into a dedicated passion and brand it upon themselves. Me, I’m a mishmash of base talents that merge into a semi-athletic fusion of potential that is slowly decomposing like the half-life of an irradiated molecule.
Because of this, I sometimes get a little lost on where I should allocate my energy, or to say, which identity should I nourish. Writing has been the only real constant and even then there have been times when the allure of a fat paycheck or the frustration of perfecting the craft nearly relegated even this longstanding endeavor to the back-burner. Some days it still does.
Other activities seem to cycle themselves in and out of my life with regularity. Example: in 2011 into 2012, I trained hard for a 100 mile mountain bike race. I put hundreds of miles on my bike every week, stuck to a regimented training schedule and watched my dog get fat as I invested far too many hours on the bike rather than hiking with him. But I needed to finish the race and ride strong. And in June of 2012, I did just that. And for the rest of the calendar year, I rode my bike exactly four more times.
Why had I at the height of my cycling powers (modest as they were) simply stopped?
I have a quote written in a notebook I keep mainly for writing purposes:
“We live counterfeit lives in order to resemble the idea we first had of ourselves.”
~ ANDRE GIDE
I look at it often and wonder what was that first idea I had of myself? What was the vision before physical and financial limitations took their toll, before shame and failure burnt away the facade of entitled success that came so easily in childhood? And what was that vision when my talents shifted, where success sprung out as unlikely as a determined weed through asphalt?
I’d like to think that there is a core “self” that ultimately imprints itself on every success and failure. I wish for it to be noble, righteous and persevering but I do worry at times it may very well be lazy, undisciplined and unmotivated. Most likely it is a stew of these traits.
In that same notebook, I have a rather terrible poem comparing my vision of myself to an undiscovered noble gas: odorless, colorless, with very low chemical reactivity. But still valuable and when properly stimulated, even electrifying.
It is in the discharge of our talents we find how well we adapt to a given identity. To borrow one more scientific phenomenon, it’s chaos theory, defined as: “When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.” Likewise, all those rambling forays into new selves eventually develops a pattern, a picture, a unique insignia that is the mysterious coda that manifests itself through each and every new experience.
Maybe it’s a heady conclusion but it makes me feel better as I a leap from identity to identity that at least a picture is being drawn. Data is being gathered. For some reason, the compulsion to be something new is slowly bringing a conclusion of sorts into focus, even if it remains vague and unknowable in the present.
And because of this, I’m approximately content.
