who or what, and why
As you age into where I now find myself, you may, but I doubt it, be as immersed in this contemplation as I am: "Who or What Am I?" It has always tugged at me, I've struggled with it all my life, at least as long as I remember, including as a child, and including as a child sensing myself as different because I'm me: why is this Being that is Me here, now, inside this human? Not philosophical, it's more existential, and sometimes includes the Why? It's a puzzle, as in "Life gets teejus, don't it".
Yet when I note that my Being didn't bother me all those eons before I was conceived and born and became self-aware, it resolves down to making no difference whatsoever, nomesane?
Blogging yielded this answer that helps:
Who Or What Am I?
I am a living, breathing organism signified by the words ‘human being’. I am a material or physical being fairly recognisable over time to me and to others: I am a body. Through my body, I can move, touch, see, hear, taste and smell. The array of physical sensations available to me also includes pain, hunger, thirst, tiredness, injury, sickness, fear, apprehension and pleasure. In this way I experience myself, others and the world around me. However, there is another aspect of me not directly visible or definable. This is the aspect of me which thinks and feels, reflects and judges, remembers and anticipates. Words used to describe this aspect include ‘mind’, ‘spirit’, ‘heart’, ‘soul’, ‘awareness’ and ‘consciousness’. This part of me is aware that I can never be fully known or understood by myself or by others; it notices that although there may be some unchanging essence which is ‘me’, this same ‘me’ is also constantly changing and evolving.
So I am a physical body and an emotional and psychological (or spiritual) being. The two together make me a person. Being a person means that I have virtues and flaws, gifts and needs, possibilities and defeats. I am basically good, but I am capable of evil. I am neither an angel nor a monster. Being a person means that I am a social animal, needing connection, recognition and acceptance from others, while simultaneously knowing myself as isolated and solitary, with many experiences which are never fully shareable with others. However, I also realise that this paradoxical condition is a universal experience, and this enables the emergence of empathy and compassion for others as it affords glimpses of understanding and solicitude, mutuality and intimacy. Being a person means that I am like all other persons, but also unique. It also means that I can never provide a genuinely definitive answer to the question.
Kathleen O’Dwyer, Limerick, Ireland
It's not the physical part of me that I ponder so much as it is what O'Dwyer calls the emotional, psychological, spiritual, the real me whom only I know, and that only in part. This is the self-aware inner being that's specifically human versus other kinds of living things, animals. Evolved into this, one of billions just like me before me, now, and after me, each one a distinct being with thoughts and feelings. Yet, why me, now? Why did I escape the lion, the tsunami, the Black Death, Mount Vesuvius, the trenches of World War One, the Holocaust, the slave ship, Hutu v Tutsi massacres, the Titanic, Hiroshima, 9/11, HMS Hood, the deadly round of covid-19, being a student at Stoneman Douglas High School or, worse, a parent. μὴ γένοιτο. Yet, why them and not me when innocents were there to be part of the horror of humans being?
I once had a Christian relative whose answer would have been "You were blessed" which as Christian theology is blasphemy far beyond Mark 3:29.
If not me, why you? Why her, why him, why them and not us? Why is there evil? There is a naive simplistic suggestion that evil exists so we'll recognize good. Which came first: evil, or people? Was there evil before there were humans? An exquisitely subtle metaphor is a scene in C S Lewis' pre-evangelical chronicle "The Magician's Nephew" in which, as the Word sings Narnia into existence out of the darkness, evil arrives because we humans brought it with us.
So here I am, who? and what?, a unique, individual Being, part of a species that originated in a single cell; from that origin divided, multiplied, evolved and branched countlessly, and continues, evolving somewhere, theologically perhaps, into the image of God.
The physical "Why?" is easy: to be fruitful and multiply, which Father Nature made fun so as to assure the species' propagation. But to the existential "Why?" there is no answer until the theologians chime in. However, in "The Bible according to Mark Twain" the angels gather in counsel and God proudly announces that he has created humans: Satan, apparently the only angel with any sense at all, asks, "Excellency, WHY?" God seems caught off guard surprised, and it appears that there is actually no answer. This trumps all the deepest and most solemn intellectual nonsense.
As for "What or Who?" of all the answers I read, I liked O'Dwyer's. All the rest were buffalo chips.
Which surfaces a Plains story.
The tribe is starving. Everyone having been summoned and gathered, the chief enters solemnly to report,
There's good news and bad news.
The bad news is there's nothing to eat but buffalo chips.
The good news is there's not enough to go around.
++++++++++++++
Vincent Van Gogh, "The Potato Eaters"
too early Saturday, hot & black: a twelve ounce cup of Lucky Goat coffee in my big, scary Xmas mug.