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| Like my box? |
As a child I was brought up playing baseball and hockey. I had played soccer as well, but didn't like the running, which scared me out of playing football. I always had a basketball hoop, but was never any good at the sport, and so I never played that either. Anyways, as far as major American sports, that leaves baseball and hockey. My dad was an avid Red Wings fan, and a fan of hockey in general. He would always take me to hockey games whether it was Detroit Vipers IHL games, or actual Detroit Red Wings NHL games. I loved the sport, and started playing around first grade. My step-dad was a baseball guy. I also liked baseball and started playing around the same time as hockey. I would go on to play both sports until high school, when I had to stop playing hockey because my dad moved, and I had to choose between baseball and golf for the spring sports season. Now, let's go back to around first grade, the older I am the more I realize that I should have given football a shot. Even in high school, I trained with the team all summer, and quit the weekend before double-days, for fear of the intense running exercises. (Just to clarify, while I am a bit of a lazy bum, I have asthma, and had already had to sit out during summer training from running exercises.) Of course I can not fully speak on the unknown, I honestly feel that if I could have made it through the running, I could have been a decent player. Hockey was never a sport I was good at, I loved to play, but during my 6-8 year career, I scored two goals, both in my last game ever at the end of the season when the coaches play with us. Baseball, I was actually fairly good at. I made the all-star team a few times in little league, and my teams usually placed in the top 3 in our league. Football, as much as I have actually played is with friends. And I am pretty much unstoppable amongst them.
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| How I felt every time I had the ball |
I am going to put myself in a hypothetical situation, wherein I played baseball (instead of golf), football, and swimming (my other high school sport) during high school. I would have some very different friends right now. One of my best friends, and the person who introduced me to the group of friends I had at the end of high school, only became my friend because of a mutual taste for playing Halo. If I had played football, it is a very real possibility that he and I would not have connected on the same level that we did. After school everyday we would play Halo 3 online for hours together. If I had football practice this would have been impossible. Instead the team would have been my friends. Simply by having different friends I would be in a very different place today. Perhaps, I would have been an amazing football player, and would be in my sophomore season on the Michigan football team. Perhaps I would have gone to a different school to play football. Likely, I would have gone to the best school I could have academically, (Michigan). But, I would have also likely missed out on the friends I currently have. My current girlfriend and i met in high school, and things may not have worked out the same if I had different friends and did things differently. My life could be very different if I had played a different sport.
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| Can only choose one! |
So the real question I come to, is whether or not that different version of myself would still be me. Of course, on the biological level, it would be exactly the same. But on the personality level I honestly think that I could have been very different. Through my Halo friend I met my other friends, we formed a band, and have been playing music together and being the best of friends for years now. we have fed off of and into each other so much over the years, that it would be stupid to think a fair amount of my personality hasn't been influenced by them. I would definitely be different, if I hadn't met them, but would it still be me? I would like to say yes, because there have been constants in my life regardless of sports or friends or anything else. But, it could be no, and I will never know which is true. And now, the only question I have is what if I had played guitar instead of bass?
Anthony,
ReplyDeleteI really liked your post! It was something I have thought about before, but never truly explored what my life could possibly be like had I chosen different activities and sports. I agree with you on the basis that you would be the same person. This is because although we use our sports, activities, and friends to define ourselves, these do not actually make up the person we are.
Our personality is something that is an internal thing, and what we choose to involve ourselves in does not establish our personality nor our actual person, or as Appiah defines it, our morphology. I believe that you would still think, feel, and act close to the same no matter what activities or friends you have. This is up to a certain point though, because it is ignorant to believe that your friends and activities do not affect you. You meet your friends through common interests, like you said. Your friends would probably change if you decided to choose different activities. They influence your life to affect your thinking and actions, but like I said earlier they cannot change your entire personality. That is something natural. In Appiah’s piece, he argues that being a certain race does not have anything to do with morphology as he writes, “That being an African-American cannot be an important ethical identity: it is a reflection, rather, of the fact that ethical identity is not a matter of morphology, that skin and hair and so on are simply signs for it.” This can be related to you being a baseball player. Being a baseball player can be thought of as an ethical identity, but it does not define you. If you were instead a football player, your ethical identity may change, but your morphology would not.
The sport you play just reflects what your morphology may be like. I think you can use this concept to describe all of your life decisions, including what friends you pick, what interests you have, and your decision to form a band. Overall, we will never know what we would be like had we chosen different involvements, but the idea of ethical identity and morphology explains that we are born as a certain person and will always stay close to who we are.
I really enjoyed this post since I have suffered through both violin lessons, art, tennis, and swimming. At first when I read your post, I thought that something as minor as how we spent our time on hobbies couldn't really shape how we thought. But then I thought some more about how famous artists -- Picasso and Mozart -- had their lives molded by that one thing. I was also watching "House" a few days ago and remembered how some people give up their entire life to dedicate it to that "one thing."
ReplyDeleteSo if it's alright, here is my input. Though, as students, many of us are not dedicated as athletes or art proteges, that thing does affect us whether it's in what we talk about or in the way we act. People who have been very dedicated to sports tend to be competitive, but the football player may be more aggressively competitive than a dancer. For musicians, it seems like we are always dreaming and finding the rhythm in everyday sounds. Playing violin before playing the guitar has also influenced the way I play -- in more rhythmic chords that tries to emulate classical and blues sounds. Had I done it the other way around, my violin playing might be very rough. Also, I feel as if I have become a neurotic perfectionist after illustrating for a few years. At first, it seemed like you could just add hobbies on top of hobbies. But even the order of how you do things really matters in affecting personality, which subsequently affects how you interact with others.
I think this point really falls under the whole concept of self-identity. I believe that there is some ultimate part of you that is who you are--this looks very different to each individual. As you go through life, experiences and events contribute to that identity. Therefore, you would more or less be different had you taken up football instead of baseball. However, I think that people often forget to establish or recognize a sense of self-identity because society is such a strong, influential force. People often become caught up in "fitting in" and such. When you really look at "who you could have become," you should also try to recognize what aspects of you wouldn't change; the aspects that make you who you are. Self-identity is crucial.
ReplyDeleteAnthony,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your post. As a fellow former high school athlete I can easily relate to your story and think that everyone has had this thought at points throughout their life. I think that the question that you raise concerning identity is obviously unanswerable but I suppose it really depends on what kind of person you are, meaning it comes down to personality type. If you are an extroverted person and are open to change, you probably would have found the same types of friendships you did in your high school years in most other circles. Obviously these people would be different, but you would still be the same you. What you consider wrong is still wrong, what you consider right is still right. Those constants in your life - your family, your goals, your desires - would all probably remain similar if not exactly the same. The only thing that would probably change is instead of Halo 3 you played NBA2k12, or maybe you may have worn a different style shirt when you went to your last party.
What is even more interesting to think about is the question of what if we lived in a totally different country or a totally different era. Your theoretical question is all a question of the Blank Slate or "Tabula Rasa" theory presented by Locke, which based off the way people react to a post like yours, seems to make a lot of sense.