The Historical Self

Lately I have been distinguishing the ‘historical self’ as one way we can talk about who we are. Normally, this is the ‘self’ that runs the show throughout a lot of our life. One fact of growing older is that there’s a lot more behind us than in front of us—more years of patterns and habits in our thoughts, behaviors and ‘ways of being’. I think everyone knows (and has probably experienced) that habits are hard to break. Some are so hard to change that the line between habit and addiction blurs. The older we get, the stronger this ‘historical self’—this storybook collection of thoughts, behaviours and ways of being—can become, and the harder it can seem to make fundamental changes.

When a habit has a physical form (such as cigarette smoking, binge eating or staying up late at night), it’s fairly easy to see it as a habit and undertake some program or action to change it. It’s clear what we’re trying to change. We either achieve what we want or we don’t: success or failure is obvious.

On the other hand, our ‘way of being’ isn’t so easy to distinguish. Sometimes disguised as our ‘personality’ and often accepted and unchallenged as ‘just the way I am’, our ‘way of being’ tends to be pervasive. Some of our positive ways of being might include: being responsible, being a good listener, being loyal, honest, compassionate and happy. Some negative examples might include: being stubborn, ‘lazy’, abrasive, resentful, closed-minded, overly cautious and resigned.

Distinguishing my ‘historical self’ from my commitments about who I am (or what I might call my ‘committed self’) can be very freeing. It allows me to realize how much of ‘the way I am’ is just habit and that I always have the possibility of reinventing myself and breaking with past patterns and habits if I am committed and can remain present to my choices. It seems to me this becomes both more difficult and more important as we get older. More important because if we cannot change our ways of being then we will, in all probability, age pretty much as a continuation of however we have lived so far—as a continuation of our story. If we can choose between ‘being the story’ and ‘being our commitments’, then we have a choice—not only about what we do, but also about who we are.

For example, if I’ve been a planner my whole life, living in a very deliberate and controlled manner, and if I want to be spontaneous and experience living life on more of a day-to-day basis when I retire, I will need to ‘be’ different. That is, I’ll need to transform how I relate to the future, how I relate to myself and, probably, how I relate to others. To invent myself in a new way, I will have to ‘be’ more confident and so forth. If all I have to work with is my historical self, this can be a daunting task.

Some believe (including a number of psychologists) that people don’t change in these fundamental ways except in a crisis or over very long periods of time. I have seen that, just as we can master other aspects of human experience, if we can transform ourselves in one arena or even observe it in others, then it’s only a matter of rigor and practice to master our way of being. People can ‘design’ who they are through declaration and commitments—new habits and patterns can emerge. These kinds of changes are greatly facilitated when we have someone or something outside our ‘internal frames of reference’, such as a coach or a Higher Power.

Another name for the historical self is the ego. I consider that the ego is to the individual what the culture is to the community or society. Both are ‘self-referential stories’ that organize and drive our actions and experience. Both stories are ‘closed’ to any commitments or possibilities that don’t fit within their respective story. Their purpose: to perpetuate conventional wisdom and limit the future to more, better or different variations of the past (whatever makes sense historically, as in the status quo). The ego (individual historical self) or culture (collective historical ‘self’) can be useful sources of information for learning, if we distinguish them from who we are as our commitments and our vision of ourselves. Without this distinction, we only commit to whatever makes sense based on our past, guaranteeing our future will be more of the same.

Transforming our culture of aging or inventing who we want to ‘be’ as we grow older involves creating a new story and then committing ourselves with all our heart to living each day in the context of that new story, the one of our own making. It means creating a possibility and committing to that possibility before there is any evidence (from the past) that it’s possible. It’s about creating a new game for the rest of our lives. A game worth playing in which the prize is having the rest of life be at least as rich, full, exciting and empowering as any other period in our life.