NOUNS AND VERBS: PART 1

I don’t know whether it’s a good thought or not, but I had it. I had it while driving home in the rain. The evening suddenly seemed very autumnal; soggy leaves, dark, brooding skies, bright headlamps. The sense of fall was racing towards me.

Anyway, I had a thought: what if we’re living in a culture where it’s getting harder and harder to separate identity from behaviour? 

I’ve thought this before of course: labels and snapshots, one vegetable lasagna maketh not a vegetarian, but how many do? When does a label become a lifestyle?  And who sees all of a lifestyle? And do those lifestyles then fix our labels?

For the longest time, when I had to fill in forms that needed my occupation, I would struggle with saying ‘writer’, and was never really sure that most people would know what a ‘technical author’ was. These days I find myself writing ‘software engineer’ because I have come to realise that this is essentially what I do. I engineer the bits of software that explain how other bits of software should be used. I work with a team to engineer something that is unquestionably soft ware.

But that’s what I do, my behaviour, my activity, my verb.

So what’s my noun? What was there in me, before I did... well, anything?

If we really do live in a culture where it’s harder to stop giving people nouns based on their verbs, then it follows that it gets harder and harder to see real nouns at all, even our own!

I’m not a software engineer. Right now, I’m a son and a brother, an uncle and a nephew. I’m a creative and a thinker, sitting in a car in the rain of an Autumnal evening. I’m a kind-hearted lover of creation, an artist who never needed to hold a pencil to prove it, a singer in the silence, and a dancer who refuses to believe that that statement diminishes his masculinity.

Some clever physicist once said that there are only processes, only events that happen. Even atoms are vibrations. I get that. Behaviour is important. But I don’t think we should allow our identity, our real selves be dictated to by a view of what we do or who others see us as. As my friend Andy says, you can only label something if you own it, you bought it, or you made it.

I like to think about that a lot.