Philosophical Debate With Myself (Currently In Progress)
Tonight I went to the 10th Anniversary celebration of an alternative education program, called The HOME Project, that I was a founding member of *way* back when I was a sophomore in high school. The basic premise of the program was to let kids shape their own education via self-envisioned community based projects: we would come up with things we wanted and figure out how to make them happen. Within the three years that I was involved, we developed and managed all the core components of the organization, held several citywide conferences, opened a youth run daycare, opened a youth run employment program, published a book of poetry, made a public tile wall, created a documentary and built a public skatepark --lots of cool stuff. In order to prepare us to actually do the work we’d committed to do, we were pushed through a lot of psychological development exercises meant to address whatever fears confronted us along the path to completing our given projects. Needless to say the obstacles were numerous and varied! That experience, more than anything else, is what I attribute to leading me on my current career path -- examining the relationships between the fields of psychology, education and leadership/community development. So tonight I found myself lost in this disorienting but incredible three hour flashback of faces and experiences, and now I can’t help but think about the path I’ve traveled from there to here…
Looking back, what really gets me is that the experience of creating and being involved in this program shaped so much of who I am and what I believe that I honestly am not sure of who I would be if I hadn’t been involved in it. That’s a really weird thought...I mean, you think back on your adolescence (or any formative period, really) and there are these key people/ events/ objects that stand out…that for whatever reason impacted you in some strong way that you didn’t even feel you had control over and because of them, perhaps unconsciously, you took action on a certain path…which has led you to who you’ve become. Or maybe you would have become what you are even if you hadn’t had those experiences, but you can’t know for sure because your life is what it is by nature of what it's been. Are the people/events/objects you credit as influences actually somehow responsible for shaping you or are you falsely attributing who you are to them when you would have followed this path anyway?…maybe our life paths end up being what they are through these random chance moments and there’s no rhyme or reason to it or maybe there are very particular reasons that a specific source functions as a catalyst to a specific individual and even if that particular catalyst hadn’t come along they’d have still found their way to their current path… but no one really knows…I suppose it’s ultimately a question of whether you believe in some degree of destiny or not and I honestly don’t know *what* I believe about the whole darn thing…
It raises questions, like: Do you have a sense of purpose? If so, how did you formulate that sense of purpose? Do you ever think about who would you be and what you would be doing if something significant had been different in your life? Does it matter to you what you do with this life and if so, why? Do you believe everything is random and meaningless or do you believe in some form of destiny? Does it even matter? If no one can know, what’s the value in asking the question(s)?