I’ve been away from me.

Busy for several days with this and that, I failed to keep account of my soul’s whereabouts. My body’s placement I can reconstruct – what occupied each hour – but how have my thoughts and personality evolved?

My account book is my private journal, which serves me as logs did sailing captains in the old days. Each dawn fresh coordinate points, weather, events on board: were they on or off course, and if off, why? Reading these accounts may be slow going, like counting the ticks of a clock: monotony was what captain and passengers preferred: “smooth sailing.” Stormy or still, breezy or becalmed, something was always happening, one was moving forward in time, as yesterday shrank to a negligible speck. Without the log, one could never have recalled one’s passage.

So with a soul’s.

It may be asked, Who cares about the transit of a single soul? There are eight billion humans today, 117 billion, we’re told, since the get-go: if everyone tracked themselves, we’d be buried in verbiage, suffocated by hindsight. Let’s focus on the future, not the past!

Fair point. Only everybody is not tracking themselves. The few ships’ logs are patchy, incomplete. A soul’s evolution typically takes its possessor by surprise. We’ve changed over the years, when we were looking elsewhere: how did we come so far!

The volatility of identity is, for many, a topic better ignored. We’ve established – for ourselves and others – a definition of “who we are” and for everybody’s comfort we cling to that script. We don’t want to differ from the self on offer, at least not drastically or often. It reassures me to be clearly me and not you, to know what I like and don’t, support or oppose. We prize acquaintances for their consistency: “what you see is what you get.”

One’s facts may veer wildly from that cozy fiction. Consider your dreams as evidence. Are you that rampant or gibbering monstrosity you’ve envisioned? Is this creature consistent with your self-description? If not, whence came it – aren’t you its author?

Typically, we slam the door on such unsettling speculations. Those abominations were, well, aberrations, inexplicable, innocuous, let’s move on!

Few know themselves well, none entirely. It’s impossible, for starters, for our self is always changing, like any living organism. Nor do we want to notice, for that would destabilize the relations and career we’ve constructed on our fantastic foundations. Many are ashamed of who they “really are.” God forbid they should be discovered!

It interests me who I am and how I’m growing. Interest does not indicate admiration. Of the phenomenon of me, I’m an observer, neither fan nor foe. I consider vanity insanity so avoid it if possible (it is not always possible). Likewise, I shy from self-recrimination, which bruises me and bores others. Let my summation be Hamlet’s of his dad: “He was a man, take him for all in all.”

I got interested in me because I needed to know who I was, so far from the paragon my parents had led me to expect and from the various avatars my fledgling self had tried on for size (Lothario, athlete, composer, plutocrat, novelist, the list is long). I still can’t say with certainty, since I’ve altered since my last inspection.

Self-awareness has been my syllabus, pretty much my whole education. I’ve learned a lot, most impressively how much remains to learn. I would never claim this preoccupation’s commendable: is any? Who can explain their fascinations or desires? Insensibly but inexorably, tracking myself became my life’s work.

Thanks for pausing at today’s page.