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The Borrowed Pieces of Us · Infinite Threads with Bob Barnett

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  [music]
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  SPEAKER_01: and time.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to Infinite Threads.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Bob.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: This week we've been playing with a pretty big idea.
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  SPEAKER_00: What if the weave is more real than the separation?
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  SPEAKER_00: Yesterday I talked about what we send into that weave because what passes
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  SPEAKER_00: through us rarely stops with us.
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  SPEAKER_00: Kindness travels, hurt can travel too.
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  SPEAKER_00: Human beings carry things forward, sometimes for years without ever knowing where they began.
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  SPEAKER_00: Today, I want to turn that around and ask a slightly stranger question.
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  SPEAKER_00: How much of me is actually mine?
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't mean that in some spooky way.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm still Bob.
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  SPEAKER_00: You're still you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nobody needs to start checking the return address on their personalities.
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  SPEAKER_00: But think about yourself for just a minute.
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  SPEAKER_00: The phrases that you use,
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  SPEAKER_00: your sense of humor,
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  SPEAKER_00: The foods that feel like home,
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  SPEAKER_00: the way you comfort someone,
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  SPEAKER_00: the music that gets under your skin,
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  SPEAKER_00: even the way you react when somebody disappoints you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Where did all of that come from?
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  SPEAKER_00: Some of it certainly seems to be temperament.
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  SPEAKER_00: We arrive here with something already cooking.
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  SPEAKER_00: Ask any parent with more than one child
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  SPEAKER_00: and they'll tell you those kids did not come out of the same personality factory.
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  SPEAKER_00: But then life begins adding pieces.
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  SPEAKER_00: Someone teaches us how to laugh.
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  SPEAKER_00: Someone teaches us what anger looks like.
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  SPEAKER_00: Somebody makes us feel safe enough that safety becomes recognizable later.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe another person does the opposite,
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  SPEAKER_00: and years pass before we realize that we're still bracing
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  SPEAKER_00: for something that's no longer happening.
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  SPEAKER_00: People leave fingerprints on us.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not literal fingerprints, thankfully.
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  SPEAKER_00: That would make family reunions very confusing.
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  SPEAKER_00: But pieces, pieces.
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  SPEAKER_00: I sometimes catch myself saying something and realize I know exactly where that came from.
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  SPEAKER_00: A phrase somebody used years ago.
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  SPEAKER_00: A joke, a way of telling a story.
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  SPEAKER_00: And for just a second, That person is there.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you've done that too.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure you have.
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  SPEAKER_00: You hear your mother come out of your own mouth and think, well, apparently this has happened.
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  SPEAKER_00: Or your father, a grandparent, an old friend, someone you worked beside for years.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's funny.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it catches you off guard because the person has been gone a long time.
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  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly there they are again in the way you said three words.
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  SPEAKER_00: You know, that fascinates me.
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  SPEAKER_00: It really does.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because where exactly is that person now?
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  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they're not simply in the past.
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  SPEAKER_00: Something of them has become active in the present.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not their whole life, of course, but a little piece crossed over.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that is what human connection really does.
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  SPEAKER_00: We exchange pieces.
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  SPEAKER_00: A teacher gives confidence to a child who had none.
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  SPEAKER_00: Years later, that child is grown and becomes the person who recognizes another frightened kid.
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  SPEAKER_00: A friend gives us a sense of humor that carries us through a terrible year.
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  SPEAKER_00: And long afterward, we're using that same humor to help somebody else breathe.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nobody, nobody planned the chain.
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  SPEAKER_00: The weave just kept moving.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think this also explains why relationships can change us so profoundly.
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  SPEAKER_00: We sometimes talk about love As though two complete people simply meet,
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  SPEAKER_00: shake hands, emotionally, and continue being exactly who they were.
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  SPEAKER_00: But that, guys, that has not been my experience.
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  SPEAKER_00: Real connection changes us.
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  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully it doesn't erase us.
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  SPEAKER_00: Healthy love should never require that.
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  SPEAKER_00: But somebody becomes important and suddenly Part of their world gets woven into ours.
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  SPEAKER_00: Their concerns begin to matter.
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  SPEAKER_00: Their stories become part of our memory.
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  SPEAKER_00: Places we never cared about become meaningful because something happened there with them.
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  SPEAKER_00: A song that was just a song now has a person attached to it forever.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's strange when you really think about it.
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  SPEAKER_00: One human consciousness enters another life and leaves architecture behind.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that is part of why losing someone can feel so disorienting.
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  SPEAKER_00: We're not only losing their physical presence.
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  SPEAKER_00: We're trying to understand what happens to all the parts of ourselves
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  SPEAKER_00: that grew around knowing them.
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  SPEAKER_00: The answer, I think, is that many of those parts stay.
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  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't make grief easy, though.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nothing, nothing needs to make grief easy.
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  SPEAKER_00: But it means the relationship did not simply vanish.
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  SPEAKER_00: It became part of the person who remains.
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  SPEAKER_00: I have people inside of me.
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't mean voices telling me to buy more aluminum foil or anything like that,
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  SPEAKER_00: although that's happened.
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  SPEAKER_00: I mean people whose humor,
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  SPEAKER_00: kindness,
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  SPEAKER_00: friendship,
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  SPEAKER_00: patience, or sheer ridiculousness became part of how I experienced the world.
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  SPEAKER_00: Some of them are here and some are not.
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  SPEAKER_00: But their thread entered mine and now I can't completely separate the colors anymore.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we were never supposed to.
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  SPEAKER_00: That brings me back to this week's larger question.
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  SPEAKER_00: What if individuality and connection are not opposite?
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I become more fully myself partly because of what other people have given me.
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  SPEAKER_00: That sounds contradictory until you think about music.
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  SPEAKER_00: A song can contain many notes without any one note losing its identity.
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  SPEAKER_00: A tapestry Can contain thousands of threads,
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  SPEAKER_00: millions, billions, trillions, without the threads becoming meaningless.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe a human being is something like that.
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  SPEAKER_00: Unique, but not self-created.
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  SPEAKER_00: We live in a culture that loves the idea of the self-made person.
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  SPEAKER_00: I've never really believed in one though.
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  SPEAKER_00: Someone fed you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Somebody taught you words.
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  SPEAKER_00: Somebody built the road.
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  SPEAKER_00: Someone invented the things that you use every day.
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  SPEAKER_00: People you will never meet made decisions that shaped the world you entered before you arrived.
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  SPEAKER_00: Even rebellion requires something to rebel against.
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  SPEAKER_00: None of us began at zero.
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  SPEAKER_00: We inherited a world And then started adding ourselves to it, weaving ourselves in.
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  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't reduce individual achievement.
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  SPEAKER_00: If anything, I think it makes life more interesting.
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  SPEAKER_00: I can be proud of what I have made while still recognizing the hands
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  SPEAKER_00: that I never saw helping make it possible.
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  SPEAKER_00: That feels healthier than pretending I built myself from spare parts in a garage
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  SPEAKER_00: And once we recognize how much of ourselves came through others' gratitude,
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  SPEAKER_00: well, through others, gratitude does get wider.
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  SPEAKER_00: So does responsibility because right now somebody may be borrowing something from us.
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  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I know they are.
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  SPEAKER_00: A child is learning what adults are like by watching how we behave.
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  SPEAKER_00: A friend is learning whether vulnerability is safe By seeing what we do
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  SPEAKER_00: with something personal they tell us.
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  SPEAKER_00: Someone we barely notice may remember a kindness years from now.
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  SPEAKER_00: We don't choose every piece of ourselves that gets carried forward by another person.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that is humbling.
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  SPEAKER_00: It should probably make us a little more careful, but not terrified.
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  SPEAKER_00: We're going to get things wrong, guys.
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  SPEAKER_00: We're humans.
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  SPEAKER_00: I certainly have gotten a lot of things wrong.
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  SPEAKER_00: The weave does not require perfection though.
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  SPEAKER_00: If it did, humanity would have been discontinued sometime around Tuesday afternoon.
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  SPEAKER_00: What it asks for, at least as I see it, is awareness.
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  SPEAKER_00: I've said that for a while, self-awareness.
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  SPEAKER_00: We can notice What was handed to us.
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  SPEAKER_00: We can keep the good pieces.
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  SPEAKER_00: We can repair the damaged ones where we can and maybe refuse
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  SPEAKER_00: to pass along what hurt us simply because it is familiar.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then we add something of our own.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's how the pattern keeps becoming new.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that is who we really are.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not isolated selves.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not copies of everyone who came before.
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  SPEAKER_00: Something in between.
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  SPEAKER_00: A living combination of inheritance and choice.
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  SPEAKER_00: A thread carrying colors from many other threads while still becoming a color that
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  SPEAKER_00: the weave has never quite seen before.
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  SPEAKER_00: I like that.
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  SPEAKER_00: I like that a lot.
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  SPEAKER_00: It means I don't have to choose between being myself and belonging to everyone else.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe belonging is part of how the self gets made.
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  SPEAKER_00: And if that's true,
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  SPEAKER_00: then some part of every person who ever loved us may still be moving through
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  SPEAKER_00: the world right now.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I believe it is.
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  SPEAKER_00: Through the way that we laugh,
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  SPEAKER_00: through the mercy that we learned from them,
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  SPEAKER_00: through the kindness that we give away without remembering
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  SPEAKER_00: where we first received it.
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  SPEAKER_00: We carry more people than we know Oh gosh, unending.
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  SPEAKER_00: And somewhere without realizing it, somebody may be carrying a little piece of us too.
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  SPEAKER_00: Think about it, guys.
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  SPEAKER_00: Please do.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Think about it.
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  SPEAKER_00: I love you all very, very, very, very much.
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  SPEAKER_00: And you know what I need you to do, right?
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  SPEAKER_00: Go out there and pass that on, okay?
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  SPEAKER_00: Later, Gators.
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  SPEAKER_00: Bye-bye.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_02: Every story, every voice.
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  SPEAKER_02: In this love we all rejoice.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: Infinite Threads, here we go.
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  SPEAKER_02: Welcome friends, enjoy the show.