Selves....

Do some of our selves die? I wonder. Do some just hibernate below? Do some lie dormant? Are we reminded of a self here and there - ones that we never knew existed until some random and a very mundane act like spilling some oil on the bathroom counter brings in thoughts of conquerers, monarchs, queens, emperors and rulers, and the spilling realisation of a very real but never-to-be-expressed self, which makes perfect intuitive sense and that which lies buried under the sands of time?

How many selves do regular individuals carry around, I wonder. And the thing is if one notices carefully one finds perfectly contradictory selves existing within this seemingly single walking physical self. Sometimes - or maybe most of the times - to remain a working and walking and regular human being one has to kind of raise one's mammothine eyebrows in a superior way or simply shoo some odd bits of a very odd self away. One doesn't associate with such a self, the one there can't really be, and there is no point in letting that other self express itself given the external world that one inhabits.

Sometimes, a self just seems to be at odds with one's regular socially quiet, indeed sometimes diffident and also awkward self. One doesn't just go and dance on a public dance-floor even if one can dance. No, no. Most certainly not if even one cannot stop one's feet, hidden by the table, from drumming on the floor.

And yet others seem sort of unfavourable to the cautious and nervy self....What?! Leap across that log there and the other one here and then go through those bushes and shrubs and those woods, and God-knows-what-else, and half clamber and climb, slither and slide up and down and up and down again some fifteen feet of an undulating slope of a sandy, crumbly and extended bank to get down to those rocks down below so that we can sit there and hear the waters of that tiny creek. Are you mad?!...well, sometimes it doesn't sound or seem that mad, after all. And one can do that. One is perfectly capable of doing the same, and there aren't strangers or wild animals wandering around, and it might be nice. And so one does. And it is.

And yet there are all these selves and even befuddling desires that live there/here somewhere....and some seem quite normal...

A self that wants to go exploring (physically real) places, the self that wants (even at the middle-age of 35) to learn how to ride a motor-bike (yeah right), the self that wants to fly a bi-plane once, the self that wants to pack a bag and go off to the mountains for a weekend, a self that wants to go for a long drive on the highway, the self that wants to walk into the waves of a sea, the self that wants to learn how to dance well (nothing but the tango will do), and sometimes wants to dance and slide along the dance-floor and end on one's knees (just for the heck of it), a self that wants to go and casually pick out a bottle of wine (not expensive - just a regular bottle of wine from even the grocery store will do), the self that wants to go spend a day wandering around at the Art Institute and along the lake in a near-enough city, the self that doesn't care too much if the rolled up jeans get soaking wet in the waters of the river, a self that wants to run with abandon and absolute focus and as fast as it can (just to see how fast it can run), the self that misses unheard stories, a self that wants to laugh, be funny and crack silly jokes, the self that wants to take a walk by the river after midnight and sit by it, another self that wants to listen to some music without thinking of anything, one self that knows it could learn how to play the piano if it went and learnt (makes me smile wryly this one), the self that wonders about stories that won't be written, one self that wants to read plays out-loud through an evening or two, the self that wants to splash water and tread water and swim through a stream or natural pool, a glimmering self that is at the very least quite wild and would gladly test the waters, and so many other odder selves and desires....

- Who knows where these and more come from (or why indeed some are still hanging around), and some of them have distinctly mad and odd desires - or maybe not. Maybe they're perfectly normal and ordinary actually - so they sometimes seem to be to me - and yet contradictory they certainly are. Some feel peculiarly masculine and yet others oddly feminine, some seem ambiguous, some indefinable. Whatever they are, they don't go away and one recognizes them, and if one is walking along the road when one sees the mental-image of one's self wanting or doing something that is unusual one can tuck one's head down and smile. Sometimes they quarrel and argue and fight amongst themselves and all, and all one can do is roll one's eyes and glare violently at the sidewalk and keep walking furiously while waiting for all of them to quieten or calm down or resolve the matter somehow. When the greatly unusual selves rain down upon one's senses one doesn't really know what is going on, and sometimes the mind very rationally reasons: it can't be possible to be this and that and the other; to want both this and that and the other. Choose. Make a choice. Even in your head, and if not, contrary choices must go out of the window. Throw them out but they come back in and then they stir. And oddly enough the older I grow the more I feel these strange selves, impulses and desires being sparked ever so often into life (surely, it can't just be mid-life crisis; surely, it can't just be my madness) - strange because one had either forgotten that they had existed or because one really had never known or because they are contradictory. And some will not be ignored, and after being reminded so many times over - one cannot ignore them; not all the time anyway, and they don't want to be forgotten.... Maybe one here and another there do happily disappear. The self that was convinced and had almost all the other selves convinced that it was born to lord over the rest of them and be an expressed messiah has not died a bloody death but has silently merged with a couple of other selves, and is certainly not complaining.

What gets expressed in the external world is another thing. I can see that. That is what happens. Through the course of living. Through everyday life. And sometimes a self pops out for a bit with great excitement and doubt as well, and then disappears because it doesn't make sense for it to hang around on the surface while another bursts upon the surface, and causes anger/annoyance/pain and then goes under, and bubbles. Others stay and on the prominent surface. The grim and grinning, tenacious academic self (why has this one survived this long? - but thank heavens it has and may it live), the irritant, the social hermit of a self, the nuisance, the quiet and noisy lunatic (the quiet one feels quite sane at times), the compulsive self, the desultory writer, the aggravatingly mindless self, the harum scarum reader, the fast walker, the incredibly slow self, the worrier, the introspector, the warrior, the distracted music lover, the thinker, the ascetic, the arrogant snob, the awkward animal, the nitpicking philosopher, the loner, the observer, the obsessor, and others, and they come with their quirks and all - sometimes they seem to be complete personalities. And some selves don't make too much profound sense really nor do some desires but they wickedly, playfully and/or gleefully gleam, taunt and tease one from under the surface, and others do (make sense) in bizarre ways. A couple or three or more or so when they're thrown at one - they end up catching one's breath and....raising a lazy smile even.