My Best Self

Here I am.

This is the part where I've covered quite a bit of ground and I try, in this moment of relative silence, to find my best selves.

In a way, I believe that even though there is only one physical self, each moment of my life has been lived by a unique self – a self that can never be totally replicated in all of its attributes but can be remembered and, if worth remembering, modeled.

It sounds almost metaphysical but I really believe it's simply a tidy way of examining life.

Let me go back a moment.

I don't generally examine my life. I do examine almost all else.

My interests, some of them passions, range from genealogy to video games, from science fiction to the social sciences, from poetry to basketball to Buddhism. It's a helter-skelter hodgepodge of pursuits and this tendency extends to my taste in music, films, books, etc.

It is distracting.

Yet in all of these pursuits, and all of these interests, I rarely, if ever, take the time to journal or keep a diary, even to simply try to capture a few key moments of each day. My life has gone by as a series of sparse and garbled spiral notebooks, digital camera images, and half-digested memories.

So now it falls to me to try to find an example of my best self. A self worth cataloging and, most importantly, worth emulating.

First, though, why bother?

If I'm going to attempt this exercise, then I should at least lay out the reasoning why.

A near-death experience?  Well no, not really.

Religious conversion?  Nope.

I'm a new father, very new, and I am eager to move from being a new one to a good one.  

Also, I'm in love.

To be fair, this is nothing necessarily new - I've been in love with the same woman since 2005.  Depending on the length of your own life thus far, this may not seem like a very long time and I'll grant you that, in the scope of cosmic time, a little over six years is not very long.  That's a digression, though.

I need to be more worthy of this love (it is reciprocated, I forgot to mention).  

My wife, son, and I spent our Thanksgiving this year at my parents' home.   We arrived several days before Thanksgiving, actually, due to the fact that the home we rented at the time had been rendered a trifle unsafe, a rock having been tossed through our window - a story for another time.

I consider my Thanksgiving self, though, or as I call him, the "Thanksgiving guy."  (Title work-in!)

Rattled as I was by the violent act against our home and consumed as I was by the efforts in searching for a new place to live, I spent that Thanksgiving, our first as a "few" rather than "two", doting upon my wife and son.  

Just as the Thanksgiving meal was being served, my son decided it was time for him to eat, as well.  My wife excused herself to my extended family and retreated to my parents' guest bedroom to feed our son.

There was my dilemma.  My extended family, parents and siblings included, were goading me into having a seat at the table, eating, socializing, familializing (not a word, I know) and the like.

My mind flashed to my wife.

It was gutcheck time.

I had the choice of leaving my wife in the guest bedroom immobile and literally attached to our son while I dined upon Thanksgiving dinner or tossing a plate together quickly, filled with food I thought she'd enjoy (I'm a vegetarian, she is not) and ferrying it back to the guest bedroom, where I could essentially spoon-feed her the meal while she held our ravenous little son in her arms.

Oh, the high stakes world of etiquette and thoughtfulness. 

I have not always been the most considerate husband - for quite a bit of our marriage, I have been playing catch-up with my wife (though I'm six-months older).  She has, for whatever reason, weathered my befuddled and often lackluster sense of direction and watched as I have, blunder by clusterf***, crawled my way toward being a better partner.

So, in that moment, I chose my wife.

That's what the "Thanksgiving guy" did, at least.

He was right and, in that frozen moment of time, he will always be right.