I have been doing a thinking lately about the nature of a person personalty and just how much it can change over time. This has been prompted by a short story I will start soon, and one that more ambitious that nearly every other one I have attempted. The changes that a person evolves through over the their lifespan is at the heart of the conflict of the story, and that has made me look at the changes I have experienced.
I not even talking about the changes that can come about due to sudden and powerful trauma. I know that my personality changed due tot he loss of my father when I was quite young. My shyness is an outgrowth of that trauma, I have no recollection of shyness before that terrible event.
No, I am speaking about the slow, truly evolutionary changes that occur as we live, meet people and change due to those interactions.
Consider a single point, musical tastes. In 1978 I never listen to rock and roll music, my radio station of choice was a country western station, and when that didn’t suit my mood I would listen to pop music. The rock music of the period held no attraction for me, yet while I write this post I am listening to rock music from 1977. Even stranger is just before I sat down I was listening to Bossa Nova jazz, and that is something else that used to have absolutely no interest for me. Yet, Country and Western has nearly disappeared from my pallet, with what little I listen too being those songs of my youth, with all the powerful emotions of adolescence holding it fast to my tastes.
You could not have convinced my younger self he would be listening to this music. He simply would not have believed it. That doesn’t even begin to touch on a whole host of things, politics, religion, sexual attitudes, all these things have changed greatly over the years.
It seems that we are not contiguous individuals, but an ever changing collection of traits and attitudes. What if anything is at the core?
I can not articulate this well but what is at the core is your attitude and responses to stimuli.
Let me explain – there is a classic joke about couples therapy. Each member of the couple is complaining bitterly about frequnecy of sex (or lack thereof). The gentleman of the couple declares that the lady, “Almost never” has sex with him any more – maybe a mere two or three times per week. The lady complains that the gentleman is “All over her” and won’t “leave her alone”, having sex two or three times a week! The difference is how they are responding to and perceiving the identical stimuli.
This is true of life also. The same stimuli can be responded to positiviely or negatively, depending or the person receiving the stimuli. I have come to realize that I am a bit of an optimist and I really do think thing work out about the way they are supposed to. Something will happen and I will usually frame it in the most positive way I can come up with. I have a dear friend who is very much a pessimist – everything is horrible and it will never work out. There are other people (Who I call “shiny people”) whom teh stimuli barely seem to touch, regardless of whether they are positive or negative. These people come shining through, regardless of what happens to them. I have a coworker who is just like that and I remember a classmate from high school who was/are always happy and never have an unkind word to say about anyone. These things are in their nature. It is possible at one point they were taught this but ultimately it is now part of them.