I’ve often been of the opinion that people are little more than the sum of their thoughts, their sparkling personalities, their souls. They are not encapsulated by their bodies, and the names are just tags for their fleshy shells. The entity that actually exists – that is actually referenced when speaking of and to a person – THAT is defined by their opinions and emotions.
And yet those things are so malleable. In my more cynical moments, I view a human as little more than a strange collection of chemicals and drugs – and the alteration of out SELF through external mixtures of sugars and more complex molecules are therefore more than just a mere “mood-altering”, but more essentially “self-altering”. The person under the influence of a drug is perhaps not the same as the person sober… I think I might (un/justifiably?) use this as a mental justification for writing some people off.
Not that I know where to draw that line. The rob who’s eaten too many Kit Kats in one day and is forcing his friends to suffer his swooping sugar high is very different from the rob who is stoned out of his mind on fatigue toxins who is very different from the rob who is focused and thinking clearly.
The decisions that we make, though – they’re supposed to be made with a clear head, stone-cold sober, while in the grip of our own tenuous box called “sanity”. We make out our wills and swear up and down that it is US making the decisions… we make all sorts of decisions, and perhaps don’t agree with those decisions when in a different frame of mind, and what then?
My separation of people’s … moods? personas? into separate entities breaks down then. It seems like then there has to be some outside decider… rob has perked up and is excited about going out (thanks to Kit Kats) or… rob is too tired to go out (thanks to staying up all night) or maybe he’s wired and jittery and rear-ends a Lexus on the Dulles Toll Road (thanks to the questionable alertness of a second-wind). Accountability needs to go that extra step, and assume that the sane rob (?!) at the Whether it’s the designated driver who holds the car keys, or the girl who’s staying over who you swear you’re not going to cross any lines with, or the friend who’s holding your wallet and is under no circumstances to allow you to buy a guitar, or the Living will you’ve put in place and asked family to carry out… no matter who the deal is with, there comes a moment when the mind changes, and whoever is “holding the keys” has to make the call if that aforementioned person has actually changed their mind, or if Y has simply occured, and that there key master is truly that person’s left-over preemptive self-control…
I’m not expressing this well.
But when the person is asking for something different, and they seem so very earnest… what do you do? You can tell them that they don’t really mean it… that the “sane” facet of them knew better, told you better… told you what they REALLY wanted…
has the mind changed? Or merely the mind-set? It’s a moot point, I know – a rhetorical question, I suppose. I wonder if a stalwart cynic can come to pray at the end, and if so, he should truly be punished for his prior persona’s lack of faith.
