On: Identity

I won my first bench trial when I was ten. 

Not that I’m bragging. 

My fifth grade teacher, Mr. Fulton, was different than the rest – looking back, he was young, probably still in his twenties, when he taught us in the early years of his teaching career.  He also was very much into the Greek philosophers, and at one point, he split us into pairs and staged a trial:  Ptolemy vs. Copernicus, wherein we had to defend our client’s respective theories about astronomy.  I was assigned as legal representative to Ptolemy, who had developed a mathematical model to show that the Earth is the center of the universe, and everything else, including the sun, orbits around it.  Copernicus, on the other hand, took the view that the sun was the center, with everything else including the Earth, orbiting around it. 

Of course, history proved my client to be wrong in his theory (based, in part, on a discovery that measurements he thought he was taking at high noon were off by at least thirty minutes – I don’t know what any of that means, but I guess it matters to people who math).  Anyway, despite being demonstrably wrong, I won the trial anyway.  I never quite understood what the winning argument was, nor have I tasted such glorious victory in my legal career since.  I also often wonder whether today’s fifth graders know who Ptolemy even was….

But I digress.  At the end of that school year, I brought Mr. Fulton a mug that said:

            “To do is to be.” – Socrates
            “To be is to do.” – Plato
            “Do be do be do.” – Sinatra

An oldie, but a goodie.  Now, I don’t know that Socrates or Plato ever actually said these things.  Even in the context of this joke, I’ve seen the first two statements attributed to everyone from John Stuart Mill, to Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Paul Sartre, Confucius, and even Shakespeare.  So at this point, who the hell knows who said what.  (Also, I think I was in college before I realized that Sinatra quite literally says “do be do be do” in Strangers in the Night – I never quite got the joke when I was ten).

But here’s what fascinates me: combining three tiny verbs (“be” “do” “is”) in two directly contrasting ways is such a profound commentary on identity and sense of self.  “To do is to be” means that through action, we become.  In other words, we are what we do.  “To be is to do” means that there is something intrinsic to us that makes us act in certain ways.  In other words, we behave as we already are.

Which is it?

I’m often asked to write a “bio” for one reason or another.  When I do that, I always focus on things that I do.  My first and foremost identifier is “lawyer.”  And when I identify myself as a lawyer, it isn’t because of some intrinsic quality that makes me one; I identify as a lawyer because that’s what I do – I completed law school, passed the bar exam, and every day, I get up and do the things a lawyer does.  I also usually include something to make me sound interesting outside of my profession:  “When not practicing law, Liz can be found training for her next triathlon, baking her locally-famous ube cookies, or playing first flute with the Buffalo Grove Symphonic Band.”  So the way I describe myself – lawyer, athlete, cook, musician – is tied to the things that I do. 

At least in our professional lives, our success is measured by the things we do – “value-add” is a popular phrase to describe a high performer, which is really nothing more than fancy corporate-speak for “what have you done for me lately?”  If I can do something for you that you can’t do for yourself, then that’s “value-add,” and therefore rewarded.

If you think about it, being needed by someone for the things you can do for them is a pretty good way to feel secure in any relationship.  If someone needs you because you do something for them, then it’s harder for them to fire you, leave you, kick you out of their lives, or otherwise abandon you. 

The bottom line is that, at least in the short term, it feels safer to be needed because of the things we do for people than to be valued and wanted for who we are. 

But here’s the rub:  if our sense of identity and value is tied only to the things we do, what happens when we can no longer do the things that make us who we are?  Or at least who we think we are?  For that reason, even though it feels unsafe sometimes, I think most of us yearn to be valued and wanted for who we are, not just for what we do.  It’s a deeply uncomfortable position for those of us whose sense of self is tied to the things we do, and it’s way more comfortable to describe ourselves as “lawyer, athlete, cook, musician,” than to say “Liz is smart and funny and has a giant heart.”  And yet, those are the things we really crave for others to see in us – those are the things we’d want someone else to say about us, not just “Liz makes really good cookies” (although that’s nice to hear sometimes, too). 

Maybe the philosophers (whoever they actually were) were both right.  Maybe the challenge of being human is to be disciplined, rigorous, and intentional in the things we do so that we become who we want to be (“to do is to be”) but at the same time being centered enough around a solid core of self so that the things we do just become a reflection of who we are (“to be is to do”).   

Or maybe there’s no cause and effect at all; maybe life is just a constant jumble of doing and being whatever we can for however long we can.

Do be do be do.