I encountered a new question this week when someone asked “Didn’t you used to be Don Ledingham?”
What they meant by that was whether or not I was the Don Ledingham who played rugby for Gala in the 1980s.
The simple answer is yes – but on so many other levels I’m no longer that same person – certainly not physically.
However, the idea of having a range of identities throughout one’s life is an interesting thought. So although we might think we have never changed, people – who have only known you at certain times in your life – will all have different perspectives of you as a person.
So perhaps the correct answer to the question is – “which Don Ledingham are you talking about?
I’m often struck by a similar thought when, for example, I see an elderly man get on the bus. I realise that I’ll never know him as a boy; a young man; in a period when he was physically more powerful – perhaps even a hell-raiser.
If we see the notion of circles of friends as a Venn Diagram – a 2-dimensional representation of connectivity in any 3-dimensional, present moment, then perhaps a small imaginative leap might allow us to picture a 3-dimensional,Venn Sculpture of spheres representing the 4 dimensions of human interaction.
If there really are 10 or 11 dimensions in the Universe, then I’m out of ideas.
My mother spent the last couple of years of her life in a nursing home, following a stroke. I would regularly get very cross with staff treating her as nothing more than an awkward old lady – it was the realisation that where I saw my mother, someone who had travelled the world with 6 children in tow, was club tennis champion in her youth and was an ace at bridge, they just saw a problem. They simply couldn’t know the woman behind the disabled shell.
My mother’s much loved brother, now in his eighties, has suffered from serious and debilitating mental illness since his twenties – in other words for 60 years of his life.
My mother will still say “But you don’t know what he’s really like, and how kind and caring he is,” referring to how he was when they were children – a very short part in both their lives but for her the “real” brother, completely unknown to anyone else now living. I’m glad she has been able to give this positive image of him to put beside the current challenging “reality”.