Activity

Activities elicit identities. While working, a professional demeanor, keenly attuned to rules of etiquette, ethics, propriety, and the like. While under the covers with a lover, a different animal emerges, sensual and primal, carnal and tactile. While walking alone on the beach, a more pensive side perhaps, questioning, wondering. While enjoying a meal with good friends, a fun-loving one may come to the fore, toying and teasing, joking and jesting, a child within now out to play. Identity is slippery. Our everyday activities elicit a wild variety of identities. The regular slippage of the self also gives way to an equally exciting and uncomfortable idea, namely, there is no self. You are given a single name at birth, yet your personal activities reveal anything but the singular: complexity and diversity, not a monolith but multitudes. These multitudes are less like discrete concretes, and more akin to clouds—amorphous forms forever shifting—appearing and disappearing, as quickly and easily as our movement is from one endeavor to the next. The risk if we stay in any one activity for too long is that we may forget who we are, viz., many others, besides this one. If life begins to feel frail and anemic, it might be because we are stuck, tied too closely or for too long to an engagement that has only allowed one self to see the light of day, while others feel shadowed, slighted, forgotten. Engaging in too much of the same we can lose ourselves to the insipidity of a singularity. Such overidentifying with one can lead to many a mistake: workaholism, alcoholism, provincialism, solipsism. If we find ourselves uneasy as we are, depleted and deadened by the excesses of overindulgence in a particular self, we might need to stop what we are doing, completely, i.e., the activity tied to eliciting this self, and instead increase or introduce other engagements, to resuscitate our well-being. The act of othering ourselves can be lifesaving. Variety is not merely “the spice of life” when it comes to activity. Variety is a vitality linked directly to our identities.