February 29, 2024 | OPINION | By Zeke Lloyd
Is changing yourself a conscious choice? This question is not rhetorical. I want an answer.
I thought about it as I stared into suburbia. Just a few hundred yards behind the opposite riverbank sat an expansive gray strip mall. At my feet, the Scioto River flowed south at a sluggish pace. It marked the boundary between two Columbus, Ohio neighborhoods: Upper Arlington and Hilliard. Behind me stood a midwestern array of deciduous trees. A tiny patch of nature, complete with beavers and deer, surrounded by hard-fought, fixed-rate mortgages. My friends and I often went to a dirt outcropping to enjoy slow January mornings in a city where cloudy weather is the welcome norm.
On Jan. 5, 2024, four of us watched the river waves slap quietly against the rock shore. My eyes flicked back and forth between the slow-moving current and the gray suburban plane before me. Mist held over the murky brown water a few feet away. From our perch on the grassy peninsula, you could only see a few buildings on the other side. Next to us, a tree jutted out over the edge of the water. Without leaves or branches, it looked like the bow of a very tall ship.
I felt no desire or ambition.
I could see my breath and feel my hands stiffen as I rotated the handle on a small metal device. The cold, humid air broke with the smell of ground coffee. I didn’t feel like myself. I felt removed, taken away from my usual routines and placed in a strange world. It had only taken two weeks. Just 14 days removed from the eternal motion of college life.
I was afraid. I was not the person who left campus less than a month ago. As the calm haze set in, I had to wonder: had I wanted this?
No. Not really.
If you can count on one thing in this column, it’s that I am always looking for an answer. Too often interviewers become narcissists, obsessed with constructing timely, elegant questions. I like questions, although I admit answers are no less profound than their curious counterparts. But to assume either can be removed entirely from their pragmatic purpose and made to contain exclusively abstract beauty is a disservice to their baseline function. Questions and answers are tiny packets of raw information.
Paradoxes might be the exception. The Ship of Theseus came to my mind as I sat on the muddy riverbank. A boat, after 100 days at sea replacing exactly one one-hundredth of itself each day, returns to port comprised of entirely new material. Is this the same ship?
Did the ship choose to change? The metaphor asks how we account for compound interest. At dawn on the last day, is the ship only a single repair away from the end of an excruciating 100-day death? Excluding some parts of the brain, our bodies are entirely recycled every seven years. Would the end of a few neurons be the demise of our consciousness?
To be clear, I like simple questions too. “How many pieces of bacon do you think they can fit into this burrito?” asked a friend, motioning to a bacon, egg and cheese burrito from Monica’s. Small inquiries often make the day-to-day tedium pass a little quicker. Not to mention, I would often rather investigate the maximum capacity of a folded tortilla than contemplate whether my identity is slowly being replaced by a future iteration of my consciousness.
But I love questions without answers.
If I am anything more than the product of biology, change in character means loss of mind. Growth is different. It’s not such a frightful act to build on the parts of myself which already exist. That’s altogether healthy. But changing requires the departure of some actual consciousness: a habit, interest, passion, thought, initiative, goal or purpose to be reoriented or replaced. I’m frightened of that.
The thought of no desire or ambition, the principal sentiment I felt on the riverbank, does not appeal to me now. That person seems an entirely separate entity. I have returned to campus. I have found balance in this life. My life. I do not want to spend more time trapped in a foreign limbo, quietly contemplating from the shore. So I make do. I maintain and manage the parts of myself which are sometimes self-destructive. My desires and ambitions remain, accompanied by the habits, interests, passions, thoughts, initiatives, goals and purposes which refuse to be reoriented or replaced.
This column is for the feelings I can’t shake, the parts of me that won’t change. This is what refuses to say goodbye, begs for continued life and ultimately will live forever on the page.
If you feel like you might have answers, let me know. I’ll try to find the right questions.