Competition
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I’ve been thinking this week about our eagerness to categorize personality, often based on cursory, transient, or wholly non-characterological criteria. It came up because of my yoga teacher training, where both the Enneagram typing system and ayurvedic psychology are major topics. (In the latter, as my teachers would have it, the mix of fire, air, and earth in your constitution—whatever that means to a person raised in the utterly disjunct ontology of the contemporary West—explains everything from your interpersonal ethics to which hours of the night you can’t sleep.)
These models can provide useful vocabulary for understanding comparative differences in outlook and behavior. The problem is that the vocabulary, rather than just being descriptive, brings with it anchorless presumptions about where a given person falls on the map and, worse, how that person will use their agency—as if their choices have been made in advance, and not by a complex infinitude of causal antecedents (a possibility we can fairly debate) but according to metaphors of psyche rendered by people who were working from a sharply limited set of information, information that did not include even rote observation of a single person who now presents for appraisal. I have yet to encounter a description of a Gemini sun, an Enneagram 7 (or possibly 9, it’s a tie), an INFJ, or an earth-air that strikes me as having much greater than 50/50 accuracy when it comes to me; or less than 50/50 accuracy in describing anyone else. And I find myself quite provoked when these systems are taken to predict future behavior. There may be a model of personality that can tell you what I’m having for breakfast tomorrow, the name of my 20th cat, how I’ll lose the thing I hold dearest, and the closing sentence of my novel. The position of the moon one afternoon in 1983, perceived relative to objects so distant that information about me could not even conceivably reach them for 100 million years, is not it.
The truth, I’m afraid, is not only more complex but perhaps horrifically so—because in my opinion we’re not fixed selves, and we’re not the same self from one context to the next, and the self we are changes with the weather and the time of day and the hormone levels in our blood serum and most of all with the terms of our relationship to whomever we are behaving toward. It changes based on who has wronged us and who has loved us and how our epigenetic line shifted when a single tipsy ancestor tripped over a broken cobblestone in 1765. It changes based on whether we had an extra cup of coffee last Tuesday. It changes based on the appearance in our lives of people who have been yielded forth by equally contingent factors. And, if we can dare ourselves to believe this, it changes based on what we choose.
As I write this, I’m preparing for cycling class, a venue in which most of my perception of the world drops away for 45 minutes, everything except for the very urgent desire to win. This scenario is unique within my life: There’s no context other than studio cycling (at the gym or on my Peloton) where I am so starkly and reductively a competitor, where I both desire and expect to beat my classmates, or orient my habits and planning and snacking and sleep and breathing and rhythm of thoughts around it. And yet for those 45 minutes it’s the whole story. For those 45 minutes my self is: winner. And no holistic assessment of Michael Owen could omit that information, even as that persona recedes—without quite vanishing, in an exquisitely nuanced choreography—the second the final leaderboard comes up and it’s time to come home and cuddle the cat. If you told a story about me based on the other 10,035 minutes in a week, but not those, the story would fail to be true. And vice versa. Can you see how hard it is to get someone exactly right?
No intimacy I’ve ever gained with another has led me to a different conclusion: We are a perpetual competition of selves, each powered and suppressed by circumstance and seen or not by everyone else depending on another multiplicity of reasons, causes, histories, motives, facts, dreams, opportunities, certainties, and whims. I find it quite painful when we try to forget this.
Coming Tuesday: Luck.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.
Very interesting Michael.