In my dream I shoplifted.

I was in the cheese section of our high-end food store, where I shop regularly. No distortions or dislocations in the narrative exonerated me; this was the Carll I recognize doing what he does.

I hadn’t meant to shoplift. The last (and I think only) time was sixty years ago – a candy bar – on a dare. I’m against shoplifting in principle and really against it as self-description. This is not “who I am”! – (that mysterious quantum).

Yet here I was – me as I am – eying one of those crazy-expensive little cheeses in frilly wrapping, glancing furtively, and plopping it into my jacket pocket – plop – then doing it again with another eentzy fromage – an instant culprit – maybe (were there store cameras whirring?) a collared crook.

My suspense was acute. No flush of pride at “getting away with it,” rather, bewilderment that this was me. I realized dimly I was dreaming but aren’t our dreams ourselves? What in me explained this audacity? I felt as if – here we may be getting somewhere – no one knew “the real me” (another chimera) – and if they did, oy, would they be shocked! Not righteous, decent, law-abiding, respectful of society and its norms, but a (pardon me) cheesy subversive, not even a grand thief, like a recent ex-President, in the billions, but a nickel-and-dimer, whose seediness smells sour if you approach too near. And now, if that store camera was watching (and wouldn’t it be, so close to the costly cheeses?), I’d be found out.

That’s one interpretation. I could envision others. And that’s my takeaway from this unpleasant experience: we’ve no idea what’s going in our minds, why we dream what we dream, imagine what we imagine, see what we see, think what we think. No more does a marionette waggle its own fingers than I do these syllables. Even “I,” one might argue, is a fiction like the first source of a rushing stream. The stream and I have many sources – freshets, rivulets, snowmelt, weather – which conduce to this Carll – and to confidently identify one is to brand myself a dummy.

We are not taught humility growing up. I wasn’t. I was taught responsibility, a crucial lesson, but one which, like any lesson, requires context. Yes, I am responsible for myself, but as an animal owner is responsible for their charge. I must school myself to behave, and accept – with charity, if possible – resistance to my instruction. It’s not easy being who one wants to be.

“To be human,” observed Kierkegaard, “is not a fact, but a task.” That’s life’s big surprise. We do not blossom into our nature, perfectly fulfilling expectations like a peony, we bump and stumble into it, steadying ourselves, gripping guardrails, like a seafarer in a typhoon. I was never, as two-year-olds have been known to insist, “the boss of me,” only my guardian, tutor, hoping for the best.

Elsewhere Kierkegaard groans:

This was the great and terrible discovery of modernity. Until humans woke to our individuality, we’d been amply defined. Hamlet in 1600 was among the first to wonder who he was. These days intelligence is born in pursuit of definition. Am I who I portray in these paragraphs – or a low-down punk?

“Now, with God's help,” prayed Kierkegaard, “I shall become myself.”