Article: Human being or human doing?

Once during a long, hot, cramped coach ride someone was sick on me. I was on a summer trip through the Balkans and already feeling rather out of sorts. It wasn’t a tidy puddle. Aided by her desperate hands it was an airbrush scatter. I’m not the world’s most empathetic person but it immediately entered my mind that one of the few things worse than having someone empty their stomach over you on a sweaty coach must be doing the same all over someone else. Someone you didn’t know, someone who hadn’t paid for the treatment, someone who already looked ugly and fed up, someone who didn’t speak your language and someone you had to sit next to for the remainder of the journey. What must she have felt over the next hour as she watched her own vomit congealing in the hair on my legs (and, interestingly, bleaching my sun tan in faint blotches)? I felt sorry for her.

But what is even more interesting, I reckon, was my response. I did something, anything. Quick, er, er. Even before she had finished spraying I was working on what I could do to fix the problem. I think I managed to give her some chewing gum. Obviously she accepted it, probably because by now she was terrified of doing anything else to upset me, but the point was it made me feel better. I’d done something. What I did was very important to me.

At the time I gave little thought to who I should be. If I’d have thought, OK, my role here is to be a vomitee, then I might have come to terms with the experience a lot quicker and enjoyed it a lot more. If I’d thought, I’m here to be vomited on; I will be gracious, calm and absorbent, then I might still have given her the chewing gum but perhaps in a less panicky way. I might have felt more content, more adequate.

We are human beings but I think we’re prone to seeing ourselves as human doings. By human doings I don’t mean what particularly environmentally responsible folk bag and bring back with them from long trips out in the countryside. I mean we tend to define and measure ourselves by our achievements and forget about the person who achieved them.

How to tell whether you believe you are a human doing or a human being:

How can we come to see ourselves more as a human beings? We can do something unusual - we can get to know ourselves.

Our tendency to neglect / avoid getting to know ourselves seems to come down to a few things:

1. It seems like an arrogant / narcissistic thing to do: What kind of person spends time, money and effort on self-discovery? That’s what people in films do. It’s what celebrities do when they’ve run out of useful behaviour.
2. Our dislike of who we are: The disappointment we feel when we do notice what we’re like is probably due to the unreasonable standards we set ourselves – the ideals we compare ourselves to. What if we could see ourselves right through and not be bothered by what we see? What if we were unafraid to look because we knew that nothing that we could discover would be a problem? What if getting to know our self was actually rather enjoyable and liberating?
3. Complacency: John Kotter, Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School, commenting on a recent economic problem, said, “When people see the problem and solution as "over there," they typically do little to change what they are doing. If you think about it, that's only logical. It's also the very essence of complacency”. Complacency never considers that who we are might be the big issue here.
4. We’re busy doing other things: We’re entirely focussed on solving a problem, completing a task, impressing someone… And when we’ve finished doing that we move straight on to our next project.
5. Amusement: During the few periods of down time we get, the last thing we tend to do is think. We watch something, listen to something, fill our senses with anything rather than endure quiet and stillness.

Our tendency to ignore who we are causes all sorts of problems. It prevents us from getting to know our self and this in turn means we are forever unprepared for and being caught out by what we do. I remember being surprised to watch someone crash into a wall. I was surprised because I’d watched my hand propel him thither. He had tried to enter a room through the door I was responsible for. I overreacted to their discourteous entry. I wasn’t expecting me to do that. If I’d known myself better I could have been ready for it. The person who is most likely to sabotage our plans, relationships and work is us - the person we are. Much as we might like to think otherwise. Conversely, the person most able to help us is us. Much as we might like to think otherwise. Getting to know who we are means we can become more savvy stewards of ourselves – better able to predict our reactions, better able to play to our strengths, better able to manage our weaknesses.

Being aware of who we are and not just of what we do is the route to much serenity. I came back from a climbing trip absolutely singing because I’d achieved not just my original objectives but more besides. I was happy because of what I’d done. A few weeks later I came back from another trip unhappy because I’d achieved almost none of my objectives. I was the same person. If my focus had been on being a climber rather than the climbs I’d completed then I’d have known far more contentment as I slithered from the rainy hillside.

Getting to know who we are just makes sense.

Getting to know who we are isn’t selfish. It’s the behaviour of someone taking responsibility for themselves and their effects on other people.

Getting to know who we are doesn’t require special hermit episodes, it’s more about developing curiosity and a habit of noticing what we do and wondering why we do it.

A key to getting to know our self is acceptance – giving up trying to be well rounded and having the courage to own and enjoy our strengths and weaknesses. There’s a lot of relief and freedom in being able to say that actually, yes, that is me, I am like that. More on that later.

The better we know our self and the more willing we are to accept our self, the less controlling our achievements become and the more we can enjoy being human beings.