Two Selves

I am very glad to be on this side of the ocean right now, even though the west coast was under warning. I didn't hear about the catastrophe in Japan until later this evening, long after the wave was merely a ripple in our harbour. All the same, I'm grateful to be alive.

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When I was reading The Moral Landscape, one concept I came across was the concept that we are split up into two "selves", the "experiencing self" and the "remembering self". The psychologist David Kahneman came up with these terms to describe the differences and contradictions in our own emotional lives. The remembering self is the one that does just that; it remembers, and it allows you to base your state of mind and predisposition on past experiences. The experiencing self is the one that exists in the present on a moment to moment basis, influenced by immediate circumstances. Kahneman makes this distinction because, Harris says, "these two 'selves' often disagree. Indeed, they can be experimentally shown to disagree, even across a relatively brief span of time.' To Harris and Kahneman's understanding, both selves have an equal share in the measurement of one's overall happiness.

This got me thinking about my own life, and how this concept applies to it. During the rehearsal process of Twelfth Night, if I were to be totally honest with myself, I probably had more periods of either frustration, boredom, depression, anxiety, or indifference, than I did moments of sheer delight, excitement, contentment, or creative flow. More often than not I went in to rehearsal to get it over with, and my mind was elsewhere. Even in performance those golden moments were few. And yet I can look back with an overriding feeling of fondness, and even pride at what we did.

Now this isn't unusual in any way. It's characteristic of anybody's emotional ride when creating theatre, and any sort of creative act for that matter. I imagine it's like an extremely milder form of childbirth, where the end somehow makes you forget the hell you went through. We're built this way, I get it. But we often forget the experiencing self when those good, nostalgic vibes come flooding in, and this seems counterproductive to becoming more self-aware and honest. We certainly don't think that way when we're in the thick of it. At the worst moments of rehearsal I found myself asking why I bothered doing it, and whether it was even worth it to continue. Furthermore, every trough seemed deeper and darker by the fact that I was already doubting myself and uncertain of where my path in life lies-- that's enough without all the added stress of a potentially rocky rehearsal.

And yet, reflecting on it, things seem rosy. Is this my mind blurring the details, protecting itself from melancholy? The main problem is when Harris says that both "selves" are equally valid. What are we to do about this, then? Which "self" is more accurate and truthful of how we really feel about these experiences? It's only a model, a way of describing something incredibly more complex and intricate than we can really conceive (like the model of an atom being a cloud of electrons; it's inaccurate, but it's the best we can do with words and symbols). Harris points out that the remembering self is just one mode of the experiencing self, since even when a person's mental state is affected by memories, it is being affected in the present moment. I look at photos on Facebook of Twelfth Night backstage, and I think "ah, good times", but even this is happening in the present. I am presently experiencing nostalgia, and it may be a blanket statement, but who's to say it's wrong? Moreover, how do we tell if a time in our life is bright, punctuated by dark moments, or dark, punctuated by bright moments? How many bad experiences do we have to have and how intense do they have to be before this period becomes a dark age? And vice versa?

Until we do better understand the brain, the mind, and the science of well-being (and I'm hoping Harris and his ilk are working hard at it!) we can delegate our experiences to the scrutiny of history. I still have trouble looking back on my journal entries from this past summer without getting emotional; it's still too soon, I guess. But the objective side of me knows that that time was extremely beneficial for me and yielded much. For the sake of the question I'm curious to see how I'll feel about Twelfth Night down the road, in the next few months. The next year. Five years down. Maybe just the same. Maybe not. But I loved the people, and I love the play, what more matters? We'll see. And when in doubt, we can remember what Shakespeare himself wrote:

"O Time, thou must untangle this, not I. It is too hard a knot for me t'untie!"