We are an interesting species, homo sapiens. For all our sapience, we sure do some non-sapient things.
Take our penchant for sunbathing. Every year, the part of the global population that spends winters indoors travels to places near and far where sun is plentiful and the opportunity for skin darkening abounds. During those times, the part of the global population that spends winters outside does its best to stay indoors while the rest of us turn ourselves on sand and poolside recliners like kabobs on a barbecue.
It feels good to have the sun warm the skin, I grant you. But it is an odd arrangement, perhaps an even somewhat perverse one, to spend unpleasant mid-day hours trying to change the color of our skin.
We don’t easily feel satisfied with ourselves.
I’ve recently had a wonderful opportunity to travel to Greece. The history, culture, and gastronomy of the country and the Aegean region are rich. So too is the potential for people watching. The world gathers atop the Athens’ acropolis and on the Greek island beaches, in search of its ancestry and itself. It is fascinating to observe the challenges of people from the far reaches of the planet as they lurch and lunge to find what they often do not know they are seeking. Most appear to fall far short of perhaps idealized expectations.
You don’t need to be a linguist to witness the insecurity; it’s plainly there, visible in people’s faces, in their gestures, in the way they move. We stand atop ancient hilltops, we stare absently from beach blankets and chairs, we move along rope-lined paths without being able to touch massive columns of stacked stone and we struggle to avoid the existential questions of ourselves amidst the heat of the day, the fatigue of sore feet, and the press of fellow seekers around us. We want to be happy. We hope to be satisfied. We thirst to feel complete.
And yet we cannot do so, not fully at least. Or seldom with consistency, finality.
It’s not our faults. It is who we are. It is fundamental to the condition of being sapient.
I am learning to find comfort in the collective unease. Personally, I’ve never felt very relaxed on a beach during the mid-day. Early morning or sunset are different; that’s when people walk. The borders of day are when we aren’t so self-conscious. Mid-day on a beach, however, has often felt somewhat nightmarish to me. My body has never been the perfectly sculpted one of the ancient Greek statues. It has irregularities, imperfections. Somehow, those blemishes and flaws feel magnified in the exposure of high surf and sun. And so I move differently, sit differently, even think differently. I find it hard to not adjust a swimsuit, suck in a stomach, wonder why I’m not darker or more balanced or some other feature of physicality that I don’t like about myself. It’s as if I’m on a stage and some invisible audience is watching.
Then I realize that the audience is very visible indeed. It is me. It is you. It is each of us, observing each other, making mental notes and judgments about one another without most of us wanting to do so. We can’t, it seems, help ourselves.
But the children – ah -the young are different. They run, jump, cry, laugh, and act like people should who come to a beach for fun. They don’t fuss over their foibles and frailties. They don’t let their sapience get in their way. They are themselves.
What is it about our need for individual identity that makes it so difficult for us to find personal peace?
Some time in Greece has taught me this: the answer lies not in the sand, the sea, the sculptures, sky, or even the inner self. It isn’t buried beneath volcanic ash or written in ancient prophesy or philosophy. We can’t find it atop prehistoric hilltops or within the recesses of a caldera in the Greek Cyclades.
Because there is nothing hidden about your or my identity. It is right there, in front of us, all the time. Excavation isn’t required. No team of personal archeologists must be recruited to remove layers of physical and psychological ash. Who we are is inherent to who we choose to be. It is – we are – immanent. “Mydentity” is nothing more or less than the experience of being me.
Our sapience is ourselves.