michaelmallon.net

its always humbling to reflect on time past and the many ways by which your life has changed.

on the surface, we always say that we’re the same person we’ve always been, believing that age-old myth that personhood is a constant, yet when we slow down and examine ourself critically, we see that this is not the case, and that personhood, like life in general, is a continuum that is always changing.

we can do no more than pick out small moments in time, isolate them from the continuum, and try our best to embed that in our memory, and this collective of small moments, of minute fractions of time, is the way by which we measure our life and our personhood.

how then do they matter? in much the same way that the collective sum of all my photographs is a mere few minutes, do these isolated memories not represent mere tiny fractions of the stages of my personhood? as the elements (wind, sun, rain, snow, etc.) can change from one mili-second to another, cannot personhood change as well?

am i the same person at the time of typing this line as i was when i typed the first?

i certainly do not believe myself to be the same person i was ten years ago, and my memories from childhood seem more like memories of a movie than actual events from my life.

is examining oneself critically really important? do we gain anything from attempting to measure how much we have changed from any one point in time to the next?

in a way, i suppose we’ve always changed more than we expected, and yet not as much as we would have liked.